Concluding a recent series of vendor profiles on TelephonyOnline.com

A new catchphrase has surfaced in the industry to describe WiMAX: personal broadband. It replaces cruder terminology used to describe it in the past, from the innocuous mobile broadband to the media catchphrase Wi-Fi on steroids. Personal broadband may just sound like marketing, but it's designed to capture a new vision the industry is now touting: WiMAX isn't just another way to link a laptop to the Internet — it's an application-driven technology that can turn any portable consumer device into a networked one.

There's a lot riding on the concept. In fact, a majority of the world's prominent infrastructure vendors have staked huge investments on the hope that personal broadband becomes a reality. If they're right, they could stand to make billions, creating an industry that might someday challenge 3G. If they're wrong, the concept of personal broadband will evaporate, WiMAX will be just another dumb pipe to the Internet, and investments made will shrivel up. It's an enormous risk, but so far vendors seem to be lining up to take it.

WiMAX is a brand new technology and part of no network evolution path. While vendors such as Ericsson are sitting WiMAX out, companies that haven't been able to achieve a lead in 3G have seized on WiMAX. Samsung and Motorola are out front, and Nortel Networks — which just announced the sale of its UMTS division — is right behind them. Vendors also see WiMAX as an opportunity to build a regional presence where they don't have one. Samsung's Sprint contract is its first major North American infrastructure deal. Chinese vendors such as ZTE are taking advantage of the lack of incumbents in the WiMAX business to break into the U.S. market. And Fujitsu — without a lick of access infrastructure outside of Asia — plans to build a WiMAX infrastructure portfolio targeted at North America.

“We're looking for those inflection points at which people make decisions in a different way,” said Jim Orr, principal network architect for Fujitsu's wireless network development group. “We think WiMAX is one of those inflection points.”

It's already a crowded market despite the fact that, with the exception of Samsung, vendors have yet to build commercial networks or record a dime of revenue from Mobile WiMAX. Vendors are looking to set themselves apart, but WiMAX is one of the more standardized technologies the industry has seen for some time, making attempts to differentiate difficult.

Nortel has been perhaps the most aggressive in highlighting its technical advantages, claiming to have a commercial WiMAX kit with three times the cost-per-bit efficiencies of its competitors. Nortel has eschewed all other smart antenna technologies to focus on multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) antenna arrays, which transmit dual signals to the device where each signal is separately interpreted and processed. Meanwhile, Alcatel has been leading the charge for beamforming, another smart antenna technology, which uses multiple signals to create a tightly focused beam steered at individual users.

But beamforming and MIMO are accounted for in the WiMAX Forum's specification and the IEEE 802.16e standard, and thus in the migration path of almost every vendor's WiMAX portfolio. Those advantages today may evaporate by the time the first major commercial deployments of certified Mobile WiMAX gear happen next year.

“WiMAX is a standards-based technology,” said Tom Jasny, vice president of broadband wireless for Samsung USA. “I'm not convinced we're doing anything another vendor couldn't do. Our advantage is our focus and the breadth of our portfolio.”

Samsung isn't the only one. The Tier 1 vendors are all making a to-do about the scope and scale of their operations, each saying they can provide the whole package to an ambitious carrier looking to not only deploy WiMAX, but to integrate it into existing broadband infrastructure and operations. Vendors such as Nokia and Nortel bring to the table their expertise in separate 3G portfolios, as well as the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture. Alcatel is the leader in DSL technologies and promises a close integration of wireline and wireless. Even Fujitsu is touting its dominance in Sonet rings as an advantage for carriers wanting to closely integrate their access and transport networks.

But Motorola and Samsung definitely have the initial advantage when it comes to breadth. In addition to having commercial WiMAX infrastructure, they're the No. 2 and 3 handset vendors in the world, putting them in unique positions to spur WiMAX device development. Availability of devices could make or break the nascent WiMAX market, especially considering the delays in 3G adoption that the lack of handsets produced.

When Sprint named Samsung and Motorola as its initial vendors, it stressed the importance of the two vendors' ability to create a WiMAX ecosystem. However, Bin Shen, Sprint vice president of broadband, said that in building that ecosystem, Samsung and Motorola certainly aren't guaranteed a contract for all elements of that ecosystem.

Shen said Sprint does not want its WiMAX or 4G service to be a handset-driven — that it already has a robust EV-DO network and growing Power Vision service to meet those needs. Sprint very much embraces the personal broadband mantra for Mobile WiMAX, with hundreds of different kinds of connected devices, from digital music players to personal video consoles. The devices that run over the network simply won't be phone form factors that handset vendors have traditionally made, Shen said.

Sprint is also looking to a wholesale access model, allowing ISPs and content providers to sell their own WiMAX-connected services to consumers. Ultimately, the consumer will be picking the devices, not Sprint, Shen said.

“We want to emphasize that these partnerships [with Motorola and Samsung] are for infrastructure,” Shen said. “We also have a partnership with Intel, and we're talking to consumer device manufacturers. On the other hand, I don't want to shortchange Samsung and Motorola. Samsung is one of the largest consumer electronics manufacturers in the world, and Motorola is a dominant device maker.”

Although it's easy to lose sight of the smaller infrastructure providers, they are already supplying a customer base with WiMAX equipment — albeit in its fixed iteration, not mobile. In the Mobile WiMAX space, they may not have the scale and scope of their large counterparts, but they provide a breadth of portfolio in one sense that the Tier 1 vendors can't match. With the exception of Siemens, none of the major vendors has a Fixed WiMAX product. Alvarion, Aperto Networks, Redline Communications and a handful of others not only are selling their fixed gear to hundreds of regional ISPs and to large carriers seeking to augment their wireline networks, they're offering them an upgrade road map to Mobile WiMAX, which will allow them to support both fixed and mobile deployments with the same equipment.

The specialty WiMAX vendors are bucking the industry trend: They're not buying into the idea of personal broadband the way the big vendors are. Those vendors are obsessively focused on mobility, and the big carriers that could support those types of networks. But Manish Gupta, Aperto's vice president of marketing and alliances, said such deployments will be the exception, at least for the foreseeable future. Gupta predicted that most carriers — even the larger ones — opting for WiMAX will look for fixed or nomadic architectures for their networks. “Very few deployments will be truly mobile,” he said.

Consequently, much of the speciality vendors' Mobile WiMAX efforts seem to be focused on operators that aren't embracing the personal broadband model but rather the broadband access model. They're concentrating on carriers with spectrum in the 3.5 GHz bands rather than the 2.5 GHz and 2.3 GHz bands held by Sprint, Clearwire and the Korean operators.

Despite all the different approaches to the market, there are only so many ways vendors can individually distinguish themselves. They are all locked into the WiMAX road map and the certification process of the WiMAX Forum. For all the chest thumping on MIMO and beamforming technologies, the reality is that the WiMAX Forum won't begin certifying the technology until enough vendors have equipment that support that technology.

The WiMAX Forum has scheduled multipath testing for its second wave of certification, at earliest next summer, meaning no interoperable MIMO equipment will be available until late next year. While the smaller vendors may be keen on supplying Mobile WiMAX equipment to smaller fixed wireless operators, the focus of the initial wave of testing seems to be focused on spectrum held by the bigger vendors, meaning certified equipment may be available to companies like Sprint and Clearwire next year, but not to those sitting on 3.5 GHz licenses.

The WiMAX Forum is neutral on the matter. Jeff Orr, director of marketing for the WiMAX Forum, said the forum plans in the first wave to test three profiles: time division duplexing gear at the 2.3 GHz to 2.4 GHz, 2.5 GHz to 2.7 GHz, and 3.4 GHz to 3.6 GHz ranges. But the forum will only begin interoperability and performance testing on any given profile once gear from three vendors is in its labs.

If 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz gear is what shows up, that's what the forum will test. Conversely, if three vendors don't have MIMO equipment ready by Wave 2 next year, the forum won't be certifying MIMO equipment that summer, Orr said.

The question remains whether the industry can support more than a dozen vendors in an environment where differentiation is difficult. In 3G, the number of suppliers is quickly shrinking, either through consolidation or through vendors exiting technology areas entirely.

But as Current Analysis analyst Peter Jarich said, a parallel can't be drawn between WiMAX and 3G. CDMA intellectual property was dominated by just Qualcomm, he said. Royalty payments and court battles squeezed vendor resources, and all but the top tier players maintained sustainable 3G businesses.

“WiMAX is supposed to be the great equalizer,” Jarich said. “The [intellectual property rights] are spread out among a lot of different companies, excluding no one from the market. Still, while WiMAX can support a lot more vendors, it has to be a really big industry for it to support this many vendors.”

Therein lies the risk. Sprint's multibillion-dollar investment in WiMAX offers a glimpse of what the WiMAX market could be, but there's a lot of evidence pointing toward Sprint being the exception. Regulation is forcing that carrier to deploy broadband wireless quickly or lose its license, and its 2.5 GHz spectrum requires a wideband TDD deployment, which cellular technologies can't support. It remains to be seen whether other large carriers will follow Sprint down the WiMAX path, and even if they do, no telecom sector — no matter how big — can support a dozen vendors.

“Just like in the cellular industry, you can't afford to have too many players, and WiMAX isn't going to be as big as cellular,” said Dan Coombes, chief technology officer of Motorola. “It's a going to be a rather short list.”

ONLINE

In an online series, Telephony has focused 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
  www.telephonyonline.com/wimaxworld