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Mobility Monomania
Much of the initial promise of WiMAX is being diluted by vendor "group think" that places too great an emphasis on the as yet unavailable mobile variant of WiMAX at the expense of industry success.
Have you tried to buy WiMAX gear for a US deployment lately? Any luck getting a vendor to commit to a ship date? Range of responses you my have received include:
1. "We will gladly sell you our [proprietary] pre-WiMAX platform. "
2. "Our mobile WiMAX (802.16e) product might be generally available second quarter 2008. I'll take your order now."
3. "Why do you want the "d" (fixed WiMAX) variant?" All the cell phone companies want "e"."
4. "Why do you want the "e" product? Did I mention our "m" platform will be generally available third quarter 2009?"
The tragedy of this myopic focus on mobile variants of WiMAX for the US market is that it misses a number of multi-billion dollar markets service providers are clamoring to take away from stodgy copper wire service providers such as:
1. The US enterprise T1 market at $14 billion and the enterprise data market at $140 billion per year in the US of which copper wire telephone companies own 98%. As office buildings are not mobile, this is a fixed WiMAX market.
2. A forth-coming Mind Commerce study puts the WiMAX in public school education market at $1.8 billion requiring only fixed WiMAX.
3. Over 90% of the residential US broadband market could be serviced with a $3 billion fixed WiMAX infrastructure (Cahners, 2005)
My research on a pair of projects found only two vendors with 802.16d product in 2.5 GHz (currently the favored US licensed WiMAX flavor) that will be available by the end of the year. Despite the FCC's Order and Memorandum handing out 50 MHz at 3.65 GHz in a greatly streamlined regulatory structure, vendors with 3.5 GHz products that require little modification for a fixed US market, no significant product announcements have been forthcoming for this potentially lucrative market.
The vendor community would be wise to focus on what works today and start bagging some sales. Chasing some far-off mobile market could cause vendors to run out of cash and fold before "crossing the chasm". Failure to do so may result in the demise of a number of vendors and give the vendor community a black eye in over promising and under delivering product for the world's largest telecoms market. What does your market study say?
Frank Ohrtman
It's the spectrum