At the WiMAX World conference in Boston last week, ongoing discussion of the broadband wireless technology's certification proceedings and spectrum availability around the world was joined by much more exploration of the potential WiMAX has to be used in various settings and with various customer segments. That's an important step for WiMAX, which is at a critical proving point both inside and outside the industry and still runs the risk of being misunderstood by both service providers and the financial community.

Perhaps the most significant discussion of WiMAX applicability--if only for its imminence--came from Korea Telecom, which is planning to launch the Korean equivalent of WiMAX, WiBro, in Seoul by April 2006. The carrier said last week that its $1 billion investment will support applications like multimedia messaging, mobile gaming, push-to-talk and IP multicasting--a clear indication that WiMAX platforms in their mobility-capable formats will be able to rival next-gen mobile network technologies.

AT&T, which is currently testing pre-WiMAX functionality for enterprise connections in multiple U.S. markets, expects the capabilities of the technology to be discovered by users based on their needs. Sandy Brown, AT&T's vice president of product management, said potential applications for WiMAX could range from the itinerant--kiosks a financial services company might set up on a college campus or temporary facilities for insurance companies to handle claims and settlements at a disaster site--to the permanent transport of high-bandwidth, high-security data by enterprises.

Talking about the applications WiMAX could support is still considered by many observers to be premature, given the current stage of the technology's development. But the focus on the mobility capabilities of future releases of WiMAX and the perceived competition of those versions with mobile 3G network technologies makes such discussion crucial, if only to elevate the perception of WiMAX beyond that of a me-too Internet access technology or a platform limited to use in developing regions. If its proponents are to be believed, the future position of WiMAX is to be a strong, mainstream competitor in a next-gen mobile environment.

E-mail me at jmeyers@primediabusiness.com.