LTE, WiMAX find common ground at 4G World

At the 4G World show in Chicago, there was a pronounced acknowledgement that it will take consolidation of equipment, network interfaces and subscriber databases to deliver on the promise of the next generation of wireless networking. The 4G environment, many agreed, will be less about underlying technology wars and more about users having consistent, high-quality wireless experiences regardless of network type.

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Different operators have different strategies about creating consistent user experiences across disparate network types, though.

Sprint Nextel, for example, expressed little interest in convergence at the network level -- that is, allowing seamless roaming across Wi-Fi and 3G/4G networks. However, Sprint and MVNO Comcast do advocate collapsing multiple interfaces and functions into home devices to simplify the life of the consumer.

Iyad Tirazi, vice president of network development and engineering at Sprint, said that he is "not a proponent of stitching together disparate networks" and noted that there are "no neutral host femtocell solutions yet." This means that as yet, there isn't any femtocell equipment that supports multiple carriers' frequencies and technologies -- a convergence trend that has already happened in the distributed antenna system (DAS) market.

On the other hand, other companies support using Wi-Fi to seamlessly plug mobile WAN coverage gaps or to support customer traffic in places where the 3G/4G network becomes congested. The promise, in some cases, is for users to move on and off 4G/Wi-Fi networks as capacity or congestion requires, without the user having to intervene or drop a session.

Consider, for example, the following:

* AT&T Mobility in June created an auto-authentication scheme that would allow a single log-on for users who could then wander in and out of the AT&T 3G network and the 20,000 hotspots AT&T acquired when it bought Wi-Fi aggregator Wayport.

* Starent makes gateways for the operator environment that allow "roaming between disparate networks," such as WiMAX CDMA, UMTS and Wi-Fi, without the user having to do anything to execute the handover, said Gennady Sirota, Starent's VP of product marketing.

* Mark Slater, head of solutions sales management for of Nokia Siemens Networks North America, encouraged the consolidation of subscriber data into a single database, in part to facilitate the authentication aspects of roaming. "Databases have to talk to each other very fast. Consolidation of databases is best [for not] interrupting users' experiences when they roam," he said.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.