Now that the WiMAX Forum has officially announced its certification process and timeline for testing equipment based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 fixed broadband wireless standard, the WiMAX sector is turning much of its energy on getting from point “a” to point “b” — or, more specifically, to point “e.”

The fifth letter of the alphabet is telecom industry shorthand for the 802.16e mobile WiMAX specification, and most observers and pundits agree: If you think the potential for fixed WiMAX services is compelling, just wait until the technology's mobile successor gets its legs.

“We see the biggest potential in portable, nomadic WiMAX service. It offers some unique services and significant value to a large number of users,” said John Hoadley, vice president of advanced technology for wireless networks for Nortel Networks. “802.16e is a much broader play than 802.16-2004. It tries to make wireless broadband easy to use and that much more cost-effective.”

Put simply, 802.16e makes WiMAX mobile, enabling multi-megabit network access for users on the move. And because it facilitates real-time applications such as voice over IP, some observers believe WiMAX poses a genuine threat to 3G networks, although the two technologies are as much complementary as they are competitive.

“Having a higher-speed option and the IP quality you have in your office available everywhere — the impact of that is enormous,” said Carlton O'Neal, vice president of marketing for broadband wireless equipment developer Alvarion. “According to projections I've seen, the mobile WiMAX market will be in the tens of millions.”

Momentum for mobile WiMAX is already snowballing. When the WiMAX Forum announced in April the availability of forum-certified fixed products by the end of 2005, the group also committed to ratifying the 802.16e standard within the same period, outlining a provisional schedule for the product testing process in 2006 and commercial product launches the year following.

Dozens of mobile operators and equipment manufacturers now populate the WiMAX Forum roster, and both Sprint and Samsung have signed on to the group's board of directors. Most notably, all of Korea's operators have joined the forum, and it is expected that products based on WiBRO, the Korean government's broadband wireless standard, will be WiMAX Forum-certified as well.

“The logical step is to change the nature of broadband,” said Sai Subramanian, vice president of product management and strategic marketing for Navini Networks. “Mobile WiMAX promises to do for broadband what cellular did for phones: change broadband to something you have with you.”

The company leading the charge for mobile WiMAX is Intel. After investing significant capital and marketing muscle into the WiMAX market in recent years, in April the electronics giant premiered its first-ever WiMAX product, the PRO/Wireless 5116 broadband interface chipset. In announcing the system-on-a-chip, Intel also discussed its vision for mobile WiMAX and said that if the standard is finalized according to current projections, it expects to begin shipping 802.16e-compliant chips in late 2006 and build them into notebook PCs by 2007.

“As we tell carriers it is our intent to build [802.16e chips] into notebooks, we have an expectation to build this market substantially,” said Ron Peck, director of marketing for Intel's WiMAX organization.

According to Alvarion's O'Neal, the official entrance of Intel (an Alvarion partner) into the WiMAX product space does much to legitimize the technology in all of its forms. “This is a major signal to the rest of the world — financial, carriers, CPE vendors, people in related or competing industries, whatever — that WiMAX is real,” O'Neal said. “You can only tell the story for so long before you have to put up or shut up, and I think everyone sees now that we are an industry moving to that mainstream spot where DSL, cable and cell phones are now.”

Intel is already exerting a profound influence on the WiMAX market. At press time, 15 service providers and 11 equipment vendors had announced plans to deliver products based on the PRO/Wireless 5116 chip, most if not all with an eye on the evolution to mobility.

“We're all designing product with a view that it all needs to scale for current WiMAX but also address mobile WiMAX, and we're building it in a modular sense so you can address it that way,” said Alan Menezes, vice president of marketing at broadband wireless equipment developer Aperto Networks. “Mobile WiMAX will be very different from fixed WiMAX, not only in terms of what technology is being applied, but also in the number of cells. There will be differences in the deployment models of fixed WiMAX and mobile WiMAX, and of course the applications will be different as well.”

The differences are so substantial that they are creating a schism within the WiMAX sphere. There are two schools of thought: One side argues that given the anticipated two-year wait for mobile WiMAX to achieve volume (not to mention the complexity of the evolution required to reach critical mass) the sector must first channel its energy into guaranteeing the efficiency of the 802.16-2004 standard to drive sales and develop service provider and consumer confidence in the WiMAX platform. The other side argues for moving to 802.16e as quickly as possible via pre-standard networks that should smooth the transition from fixed to mobile.

Falling squarely on the side of the latter argument are many wireline service providers itching to launch broadband services in new markets. Mobile WiMAX also can't arrive soon enough for cable operators that are angling to expand their existing triple-play bundles with the addition of wireless services.

“The MSOs created the triple play, and every other segment is trying to respond to that — and then some,” said Mike Seymour, vice president for Alcatel's mobile radio division. “The next thing for all of them is, ‘What do I add on top?’ WiMAX has the attention of all market segments at the highest level of every company.”

A handful of vendors, like Navini and NextNet Wireless, are already deploying pre-standardized mobile WiMAX networks, a potentially precarious venture should the WiMAX Forum's eventual 802.16e specification resemble something dramatically different from what these manufacturers and operators are currently installing. According to NextNet Vice President of Business Development Charles Riggle, the risks are minimal.

“We have a path that will take us from today's proprietary product to one where certification can be provided in the networks that our customers deploy,” Riggle said. “Our products espouse the attributes that will become and be ratified for 802.16e, and there's still some technical discussion and debate on exactly how those attributes will be integrated into a chip, for example.

“There's still a sufficient time gap between today and when certification will occur that our customers don't have any hesitation in continuing to deploy the system we have now,” Riggle continued.

Indeed, most everyone with a vested interest in mobile WiMAX seems to agree that its success is a virtual lock. In other words, the course to point “e” is clear, as long as no one gets lost along the way. Said Navini's Subramanian: “Our biggest challenge is one of execution.”