CUTTING EDGE

“WiMAX can easily be over-hyped right now,” says Ron Resnick, director of marketing for Intel's broadband wireless division. The former U.S. Air Force pilot made that observation, ironically enough, in the scant days between keynoting the first-ever “WiMAXCon” convention in Los Angeles and kiting off to Hong Kong to keynote the 3G World Congress. Resnick may be leery of over-hyping WiMAX, but he's not about to under-hype it either.

As a shepherd of new wireless technologies at Intel, Resnick sits in the cockpit of one of the most powerful and influential forces driving the WiMAX industry today. And as president and chairman of the WiMAX Forum, the group formed to guide WiMAX's evolution and bolster support for — and investment in — WiMAX, Resnick's role is to harness that hype, to ignite it while maintaining enough control to keep the movement's nose up.

Next year, the WiMAX Forum will play a crucial role in the technology's maturation by grounding hype in reality with a European lab that will apply uniform standards and testing to certify the first WiMAX products around the middle of next year. Beyond that, the lab will certify interoperability of those products, which may occur toward the end of next year or in early 2006. Eventually, the lab will christen a new generation of mobile WiMAX equipment.

One of the Forum's chief priorities at the moment, Resnick says, is rallying service providers to the cause and giving them the confidence to invest in commercial trials next year. A quick glance at the ranks of the Forums members — who cannot join without making a commitment to the technology and which includes AT&T, SBC Communications, Qwest Communications, Covad Communications and Time Warner Telecom — suggests Resnick is successfully winning over service providers to WiMAX.

“I think we've done a reasonable job because a year ago, we had none, and now we have close to 50,” he said. “A reasonable job.” There, that's not too over-hyped.