Coming Soon To An Internet Near You: WiMax

WiMax is the next generation of the Internet -- and it's finally here and growing fast.

That was the assessment of morning speakers on the opening day of WiMax World 2008 at Chicago's McCormick Place.

Thousands of industry participants, vendors and the media gathered in a packed Skyline Ballroom to hear from several industry leaders in the general session portion of Wednesday's program before highly technical sessions in the afternoon.

WiMax is a Wi-Fi-like broadband wireless signal -- only instead of a hot spot a few hundred feet in diameter, WiMax is a powerful signal from a tall broadcast tower, reaching as far as a TV or FM radio station.

Brege Ayvazian, chief strategy officer at Yankee Group and event co-chair, said the good news is that WiMax has "several mobile operating networks now that are commercial, generating cash flow, attracting customers, and paving the way for 4G," the shorthand term for fourth-generation wireless services like mobile HDTV.

The bad news, of course, is that "we're doing all this in the face of a global economic downturn and a credit crisis." Ayvazian said it's "challenging to raise capital for new telecom businesses."

Neverthless, Ron Reznick, president and CEO of the WiMax Forum standards agency, said that "WiMax is ready to connect the world with affordable broadband."

Reznick said that of the world's six billion people, three billion use mobile phones, one billion are on the Internet and 400 million are on broadband. "So there's a lot to do, and WiMax gives us the opportunity to capture a lot of this market," he said.

WiMax deployments are particularly strong overseas, where the technology is being used to leapfrog wired networks. In India, for instance, a company called BNSL has deployed WiMax to 10 major cities in India, and plans to cover 15,000 rural villages as well by late 2009. India's tech giant Tata also plans to blanket 100 major cities with WiMax by 2010. Another company called Digicell is deploying WiMax in the Caribbean.

Reznick characterized the effects of widespread WiMax deployment as "The Internet Unleashed." He said it would allow users to do whatever they do on the Internet at home anywhere, no hotspot needed.

The industry is also working on common standards for roaming, so users can use WiMax anywhere, not just in their home broadcasting area.

Currently WiMax has 407 deployments in 133 countries. (If you'd like to check for yourself, check www.wimaxmaps.org.)

Benjamin G. Wolff, CEO of Clearwire -- the company that's now deploying live WiMax networks in Baltimore and soon in other cities -- opened his presentation with a video that imagined a future in whcih a TV program could be paused in a living room and picked up without a beat in a car outside. Or try realtime traffic video from your car on for size.

Wolff noted that broadband at home created huge companies like Google and Amazon. Broadband everywhere, he said, would present possibilities exponentially beyond that.

Wolff said Clearwire plans to cover 140 million Americans with its service by late 2010, including the vast majority of the top 100 markets and numerous smaller ones.

Of Clearwire's early adopters, Wolff said 95 percent have access to cable or DSL high-speed service, and two-thirds are coming to Clearwire from other forms of broadband.

The morning's initial speeches wrapped up with Dan Moloney, executive vice president of Motorola Inc., who spoke of the power of networks -- initially the electric power grid, then the Internet, then the cell phone network.

Moloney said the outgrowth of WiMax would be "media mobility," with three effects: a video explosion, in which virtually all Internet users want video in HD both upstream and downstream; prime time to "my time," with unlimited time shifting of content; and broadband on the go, with portable video players everywhere.

Speakers predicted 130 million WiMax subscribers by 2012, up from 10 million now.