Though the number of WiMAX subscribers globally remains miniscule, proponents of the emerging broadband access technology already have started calling for guidance on how to allow seamless subscriber roaming between multiple network operators.

The subject came up in the U.S. this summer when Clearwire and Sprint both committed to deploy Mobile WiMAX at 2.5 GHz in their respective markets, and it surfaced several times at this month's WiMAX World Conference and Expo in Boston.

“Roaming is one of the significant things that needs to be addressed before you talk about this being a global service,” said Berge Ayvazian, chief of strategy for Yankee Group and co-chair of the conference, now owned by the consulting firm.

Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel's Sales and Marketing Group, added during a keynote speech, “Now [with Wi-Fi], you go to a hotspot, you have to pull out a credit card and answer 17 questions to get online. With [Mobile WiMAX], fixing that becomes critical. Roaming is one of the issues that needs to be fixed.”

News came later in the conference that the WiMAX Forum is driving an effort to create an ecosystem for global WiMAX roaming and also plans to set up its own roaming brokerage service.

Forum Chairman and President Ron Resnick outlined those plans at the conference. About four months ago, the Global Roaming Working Group became the WiMAX Forum's eighth task group, and an official from Korea Telecom, which launched commercial WiBro/WiMAX services a few months ago, is chairing the effort, Resnick said. The working group will establish technical roaming guidelines, a roaming process flow, roaming agreement templates, a common billing exchange format and a method for providing brokered roaming services.

Resnick added that as the number of WiMAX service providers increases, the WiMAX Forum will offer its own brokered roaming services, with the revenue gained from the brokerage invested back into the forum's membership activities.

“If operators throughout the world want to roam, the WiMAX Forum will help them to do that,” Resnick said. In doing so, the forum is taking cues from how the GSM Association first helped enable GSM inter-network roaming in the early 1990s.

ONLINE

If you missed WiMAX World, we got you covered. Visit our story archive for news from the show and our podcast. Also, don't miss this online series in which Telephony focuses on six vendors hoping to be WiMAX winners:

• Motorola: “Mo” for momentum
• Nortel: Playing up MIMO
• Alvarion: Fixed WiMAX footing
• Alcatel: The broadband leader
• Samsung: WiBro experience
• ZTE: Leveling the playing field
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