Wednesday's opening day of the WiMax World 2008 conference in Chicago covered the technological promise of WiMax wireless high-speed Internet access.
Thursday's second day covered the real-world applications -- places where WiMax is already providing mobile high-speed service at low rates.
Hwan Chung, senior vice president of Samsung Telecommunications America, spoke of his company's involvement in a variety of WiMax deployments, and its product offerings of complete systems, wireless devices for PCs and chips for consumer electronics devices.
Chung said four major deployments of WiMax around the world are using Samsung gear, including Xohm (pronounced "zome," rhymes with "home") in the United States, UQ in Japan, Yota in Russia and KT in Korea.
Xohm is the joint effort of Clearwire and Sprint-Nextel to blanket the largest cities in the United States with WiMax coverage. Its first market, Baltimore, went live Sept. 29. Chung showed future advertising that will be used to push the system, with taglines like "Xohm Here. Life Better." and "Imagine a hotspot the size of Baltimore."
Denis Sverdlov, CEO of Scartel LLC, spoke of his company's rollouts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which will blanket 20 million people with WiMax coverage by next month. He said the system has been shown to work inside buildings 50 meters from windows, but the system nonetheless has installed 5,000 radio repeaters for applications like subways and parking garages, to make sure the service truly blankets the cities.
He said WiMax needs cheap hardware -- he suggested "dongle" USB connection devices at $30 -- along with consistent roaming deals and embedded connectivity in notebooks and phones to succeed. He also said WiMax's former biggest challenge, battery life, had been conquered. He showed off a WiMax phone that has an idle time of 24 hours and download time of five hours.
Sverdlov said his daughter has already grown accustomed to watching WiMax HDTV on a four-inch personal video player.
As for profitability, Sverdlov joked that "we have an optimistic plan, and another one which I actually believe." But he said the system can be profitable with modest uptake.
Equally ebullient was Atish Gude, senior vice president for mobile broadband operations at Sprint Nextel's Xohm business unit.
He said that Monday, Sept. 29 will probably go into the history books for its 777-point decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. But it should go into the books for the launch of Xohm in Baltimore.
"We launche the largest U.S. mobile WiMax network in a major city, and ushered in a new era for the mobile Internet, an era of new competition, and new innnovation, and most importantly a new era of the way customers can live, work and play with the greatest repository of information and knowledge on teh planet, the Internet," Gude said. "We did just what we said we were going to do. We launched by Sept. 30, on multiple devices, with no credit checks or contracts."
Gude said WiMax's ultimate success will hinge on the availability of embedded chipsets in phones and computers, as has the success of Wi-Fi.
Xohm in Baltimore is currently offering four service plans -- a home plan with a fixed $80 modem for $35 a month, an "on the go" mobile plan with a $60 notebook card for $45 a month, a "Pick 2" with both home and mobile service for $65 a month and a "day pass" for travelers and tourists -- unlimited one-day use for $10 a day.
Xohm is scheduled to spread soon to other markets.
Giving a peek at WiMax in smaller markets was Kelley Dunne, president and CEO of DigitalBridge Communicaitons, which is focused on rolling out WiMax in smaller markets of less than 150,000 population.
DigitalBridge covers 240,000 households in 15 markets in Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Indiana, Virginia and West Virginia. It's adding 1,500 to 2,000 subscribers a month. Most importantly, Dunne said seven of those markets will be cash-flow positive by the second quarter of 2009.
Essentially, DigitalBridge is using WiMax to offer broadband access of up to seven megabits a second to areas that didn't have a prayer of getting it before.
There have been plenty of unexpected applications -- like the TV station in Idaho Falls using WiMax to do live video remotes from nearby towns they'd never been able to afford before.
Dunne reminded the crowd that cable TV and satellite TV were originally focused on rural markets too -- and he said there are potentially 6,000 rural markets where DigitalBridge could provide services.
The morning's last keynoter was Sue Spradley, president of North American operations at Nokia Siemens Networks.
She said the telecom industry needs to decide that fourth-generation services aren't going to take the same path as earlier technologies, which grew haphazardly.
"That mkeans we need to make usability mater, that we need to play for security from Day One, not after there are security problems on the network," she said.
The WiMax conference wound down Thursday afternoon with several technical sessions.
As for your humble narrator, he's taking a driving day tomorrow to go 400-some miles north to Houghton in order to kick off the Michigan portion of the 2008 Fall Tech Tour -- at Michigan Technological University Saturday. There'll be a Friday night dinner with MTU tech types, and a full morning of meetings Saturday before Michigan Tech's Homecoming football game Saturday afternoon. I'll keep you posted!
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