When AT&T recently proposed to acquire BellSouth, telecom industry observers talked about the potential far-reaching implications for a number of different technologies and markets: Will BellSouth adopt AT&T's architectural approach to IPTV? How will the two companies' various hardware and software vendors be affected? Would the combined entity accelerate implementation of IP multimedia subsystem components and its pursuit of fixed/mobile convergence?

These are all important questions that will affect the future of the companies, their vendors and their customers, but one question that was not being asked was: How will these companies, if they complete their proposed merger, integrate their strategies for WiMAX? With the deal likely to take a year or more to close, it may be a while before we know the answer. In the meantime, WiMAX will continue to evolve, and AT&T and BellSouth each probably will continue to learn from the broadband wireless experience they are already gaining through their own separate trials and commercial rollouts.

WiMAX Forum-certified customer premises equipment, handsets, laptop cards and other subscriber access gear is not yet crowding the shelves at all the big-box consumer electronics retailers, but that has not stopped service providers and vendors from gathering information that will help them shape the experience on end users to come.

BellSouth has been particularly busy with broadband wireless. The company owns spectrum licenses in both the 2.5 GHz former Multi-channel Multi-point Distribution Service (MMDS) band, as well as the 2.3 GHz Wireless Communications Services (WCS) spectrum band.

The company initially deployed service last August in Athens, Ga., offering access speeds of 1.5 Mb/s, and has since deployed in Biloxi, Miss.; Gulfport, Miss.; New Orleans; Palatka, Fla.; and most recently in DeLand, Fla., in January. Susan Steele, senior director of wireless broadband for BellSouth, said in late January that the carrier's broadband wireless expansion plan called for it to continue aggressively deploying base stations and building out new markets through 2006 and 2007. She said then that the company is aiming to meet a goal of having 22 base stations deployed in the 2.3 GHz range by 2007 to comply with minimum use requirements for the WCS spectrum formulated by the FCC.

Also in late January, BellSouth issued a further request for proposal for broadband wireless equipment in the 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz ranges, what Steele at the time referred to as a “WiMAX RFP,” even though WiMAX Forum-certified equipment is not yet available in 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz profiles. Steele, though, also said that BellSouth would be working within the WiMAX Forum to coax the group to work on these profiles.

The RFP was intended to detail the importance of price and speed-to-market requirements. “Price is a huge issue, and the bar has been set in broadband by DSL and cable modems already,” she said. Steele did not say where and how soon BellSouth plans to commercially deploy the equipment. “We'd like to get the responses and choose vendors to get something in our lab by the second quarter,” she said.

AT&T also has been pursuing its own strategy for WiMAX. The company launched trials in Middleton, N.J., and in Atlanta over the last couple of years, and though the New Jersey trial only involved a single pre-WiMAX base station and a couple of enterprise customers, the Atlanta trial was expanded last summer to involve several sites. In public speeches over the last two years, different AT&T technology executives lamented the shortage of viable and available spectrum in which WiMAX could be deployed in the U.S. — for the trials, the carrier giant worked with spectrum “on loan” from the FCC. The merger with BellSouth would seem to help solve that spectrum problem, at least to some small degree.

Even before AT&T and BellSouth announced their planned deal, there was another service provider megamerger — the union of Sprint and Nextel — that had broadband wireless and WiMAX as one of its footnotes. Both Nextel and Sprint owned spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band, and their marriage made Sprint Nextel the single largest owner of 2.5 GHz spectrum.

Before their merger, which was announced in early 2005 and closed last August, Nextel already was pursuing tests and field trials of pre-WiMAX broadband wireless systems, including solutions using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) from Navini Networks, IPWireless and Flarion Technologies, among others. OFDM is the technology specified in the IEEE's 802.16-2004 standard. In its earliest trials, Nextel, which operated an iDEN network, was looking for a wireless upgrade alternative that could match 3G. Company executives said at the time that they were looking for a broadband service solution that could be offered to customers somewhere near the $20 per month range.

Meanwhile, Sprint's experience with the 2.5 GHz spectrum has been star-crossed. The company originally began offering MMDS services at least seven year years ago, but the solution never caught on and in 2001, with 52,000 customers signed up, Sprint stopped actively marketing the service. Later, in mid-2002, the company began trials with both Navini and IPWireless but has never committed to a broad commercial rollout (Though it recently extended its trial with IPWireless). Also, last summer, just before the merger with Nextel closed, Sprint signed on with Motorola to do an 802.16e technology trial and to contribute to the development of a Mobile WiMAX solution. Sprint also has a WiMAX-related partnership with Intel.

To top it all off, Sprint Nextel said late last year that it was teaming with Samsung Telecommunications America to test technologies based on 802.16e, presumed to include WiBro, which Samsung pioneered in South Korea. (It was the primary vendor for one of the first public trials of WiBro with Korea Telecom at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit last November.)

Barry West, chief technology officer of Sprint Nextel, said the relationship would provide the carrier with important information about infrastructure and handsets by testing Samsung terminals in lab and in field environments but also would provide guidance for developing future services. “The agreement with Samsung will help align technologies and validate requirements for future wireless offerings,” he said. “We are evaluating multiple options for 2.5 GHz applications and fostering strategic relationships with ecosystem partners that are vital to progress on next-generation wireless broadband access and infrastructure.”

After Sprint Nextel, Clearwire, the Kirkland, Wash., service provider founded by Craig McCaw, probably is the second-largest owner of licenses in 2.5 GHz spectrum. The company has been quietly but busily launching networks over the last three years in several countries. It serves 29 markets in the U.S. over the 2.5 GHz spectrum and serves other markets in Belgium, Ireland, Denmark and Mexico, among others, over 3.5 GHz spectrum. Clearwire typically offers service between $30 and $37 per month, according to its Web site, and access speeds are about 1.5 Mb/s for downlink and 256 kb/s from uplink.

Clearwire's Mexican partner, MVS.net, has been particularly busy of late, working with vendor NextNet Wireless, which itself is owned by Clearwire, to launch voice over IP and data services earlier this year. Jose Antonio Abad, CEO of MVS.net, said in January that average call volume was 1.6 million calls per month, generating more than 3.7 million VoIP minutes per month across Mexico City, Monterrey, Guadalajara, Toluca and Mexicali.

MVS.net is a carriers' carrier. Some of its clients include Avantel (a joint venture of MCI), Alestra (a joint venture of AT&T) and its own ISP Ego. Miguel Calderon, Avantel's executive vice president of marketing, said after the launch, “We are thrilled with the rapid uptake — our subscriber base is growing beyond our expectations, and call volumes are on the rise. We are experiencing the mass-market appeal of this technology firsthand and are happy to report that we are already ahead of our forecasted unit sales by 20%.”

In Europe, service providers have been particularly aggressive deploying pre-WiMAX services. Irish Broadband has used equipment from Alvarion, Navini and others to offer a wide variety of services and bandwidth classes to both businesses and consumers for a range of monthly fees. Iberbanda in Spain has been similarly aggressive, deploying Aperto Networks gear as part of a national network buildout that began in early 2005. Service providers in Kiev, Ukraine, and Islamabad, Pakistan, also recent deployed Aperto's system at 3.5 GHz.

The trial and commercial rollouts are giving all of the service providers in many countries necessary experience in selling broadband wireless to the masses. Though the industry is still very early in the evolution of WiMAX, with only a handful of actual WiMAX Forum-certified systems commercially available so far, these service providers have banked important information about what their customers are willing to pay and how they want to use the service. They are also already bringing broadband to the table for applications that can't be addressed in other ways. NextNet customer Evertek, a wireless ISP in Sioux City, Iowa, deployed a solution for the local police force that enables police officers to access and send information from their cars over a high-bandwidth wireless connection. In one situation, police are even able to access a video streaming feed to monitor security at a local high school.

Roxanne White, general manager of Evertek, said, “We were thrilled that we did not have to wait for WiMAX technology.”