* WiMAX finally enters sphere of reality
In the early days, I faithfully attended the WiMAX World conference. Then, admittedly, I quit going for several years.
As an advocate for enterprise IT departments, I wasn’t finding pre-standard discussions among WiMAX network infrastructure providers over what frequencies their products used particularly relevant. The way I saw it, circa 2002 to 2004, we needed ratified standards, then standard infrastructure devices, then networks to be built from them, then services, then client devices…. It all seemed too many hops away from the interests of the enterprise to be particularly meaningful.
However, last week’s WiMAX World in Chicago indicated that we are finally close to all these moving parts falling into place. Commercial service availability is imminent. Unlike past shows, there were WiMAX devices and PC cards. In development is the ultra-mobile PC – a “mobile Internet device” about the size of a VHS tape – demo’d by the likes of Samsung and Nokia for use on WiMAX networks. For its part, Motorola demonstrated a Razr-like device with WiMAX and is building WiMAX chips.
What turned the corner for WiMAX, of course, was Sprint Nextel’s decision about a year ago to use WiMAX as its “4G” standard for broadband, IP-based mobile services. The company has said it will roll out trial services under the brand moniker Xohm in at least two markets by year-end (Chicago, D.C., and/or Baltimore), will offer Xohm services in multiple markets in early 2008 and, along with partner Clearwire, plans to cover 100 million people with commercial WiMAX services by late 2008.
WiMAX proponents Sprint, Intel, Google and others talk about the multimegabit-speed mobile broadband technology as opening up mobile access to the Internet. But it’s been pretty much determined that Web sites aren’t going to adapt to mobile networks and tiny handsets (remember WAP?).
Rather, the mobile environment needs to adapt to the Web, much in the way back-end business applications are now finally adapting (see last week’s story, “DIRECTV mobilizes CRM application for sales force”) This is the step that might prove to be the most challenging.
