I’ve been a bit tardy on the blog of late, will try to make up for it over the next few days. I was in Singapore last week, to attend and speak at the WiMAX Forum’s Asia Congress event. To be fair, I’m a WiMAX newbie. I can spell WiMAX, of course – but I was quite unaware of the commercial progress the technology has made over the past couple of years. A couple of facts to set the scene:

• WiMAX is a radio technology based on the IEEE 802.16 standard. 802.16d is the earlier variant, and was designed for point-to-point connections, while 802.16e adds mobility (mobile device support)
• While WiMAX could theoretically run on any spectrum below 66GHz, the licensed variants operate in 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz, or 3.5GHz. There is no single dominant spectrum deployment
• Intel has been the clear leader in creating WiMAX chipsets, and there are many other smaller suppliers. Equipment vendors such as Samsung, Motorola and LTE have WiMAX infrastructure offerings, as do a large number of lesser-known providers.
• A lot of countries have active or planned commercial WiMAX deployments. A surprising number – I believe there are upwards of 400 planned or deployed WiMAX networks currently
• Intel is planning to have WiMAX chipsets inside a lot of their components, while the likes of Dell, Lenovo, Acer etc will incorporate these into laptops or netbook devices.

One aspect of the congress I found intriguing is how separate the WiMAX community believe the high-speed Internet opportunity is from the “3G” network providers. In fact, it reminded me a little of being at Linux conferences in the late part of last century, where Microsoft was the non-attending “enemy”.  I mean, everyone in the “community” evangilised that Linux could (and should) do everything, in reality the outside world knew that coexistence was the ultimate desitination. The WiMAX “choir” certainly put forward a good argument for their technology, claiming better performance than various HSDPA networks (an assertion I take with a grain of salt, being quite impressed with the 4MBps I regularly achieve on Telstra’s HSDPA network here in Australia, even with a superseded USB dongle). There were a number of technical arguments for why WiMAX is superior, mostly about it not being an “overlay” radio technology like LTE will be, but I wasn’t absolutely convinced.

Anyway, the WiMAX supporters spoke glowingly about their achievements, and as stated earlier I was surprised by the number of networks under deployment. Clearwire, for example, the Sprint/Google/Comcast (with others) venture in the US seems to be pumping a lot of money into their advertising (a number of TV commercials were shown in the opening keynotes).  There were a number of sessions talking about network ROI, which I found interesting, and my own session on value-added services (VAS) had a good audience and generated several follow-up discussions.

I’ll be watching the WiMAX space more closely in coming months. I’m not sure that I’d be an immediate candidate consumer (we have no useful WiMAX networks in Brisbane, at the moment) but if Intel do go ahead with the number of OEM WiMAX devices they are suggesting, there will be a lot of interest in using those services. How they will compete against rapidly commoditized HSDPA in mature markets will, of course, remain to be seen.