Supercomm 2005 experienced a flurry of WiMAX activity this month as the industry sector prepared for its final certification trials next month. Some vendors released their final WiMAX standard-grade gear, others announced their intention to explore different spectral horizons and two U.S. Tier 1 carriers announced expanded WiMAX and broadband wireless access, or BWA, trials.

But as the buzz around the fixed-wireless WiMAX standard reached cacophonic levels, divisions within the WiMAX community became apparent. The wedge was between the large network infrastructure providers that back the next-generation of the technology, which is designed to transform WiMAX from a fixed architecture to a truly mobile technology, and the smaller broadband wireless vendors, all of which have wholeheartedly embraced the current generation.

While the smaller OEMs in the WiMAX Forum were trying to build fanfare for fixed WiMAX's commercial debut later this year, some of the large vendors were referring to the first generation as “backhaul technology.”

Disagreements among the forum's membership aside, it became very apparent that 2006 will be the year WiMAX will prove its meddle. All certification and interoperability trials for the gear are expected to culminate this year, resulting in the first batch of base stations and customer premises equipment (CPE) bearing the unqualified stamp of “WiMAX.” Carriers have already begun deploying the pre-certification WiMAX gear, anticipating only minor software upgrades to make their networks fully forum-compliant after certification.

“We have to call it pre-WiMAX, but what's pre-WiMAX?” asked Vern Fotheringham, Adaptix CEO. “What you're seeing is what WiMAX will be.”

Perhaps most significant, however, is the interest that the major carriers have started taking in the technology. At Supercomm, BellSouth announced it would expand its modest BWA trials in Florida to the University of Georgia's hometown of Athens and will expand to more markets later this year. The residential trial is targeting university students, using Navini's Ripwave equipment. While Navini is a WiMAX Forum member, it has developed its own proprietary solution based on a revised version of WiMAX, which adds partial mobility to the network ahead of Mobile WiMAX or 802.16e standard. While BellSouth has not announced any plans to fully migrate the trials to a WiMAX-2004 architecture, several WiMAX vendors have begun targeting the 2.3 GHz wireless communication services (WCS) spectrum BellSouth owns and is using in its trials, opening up the possibility.

A week later AT&T also said it would expand its broadband wireless trials, this time using pre-certification WiMAX gear from multiple vendors. The launch is the first BWA entry of a Tier 1 carrier into a major market since Sprint's failed attempts commercialize its multichannel multipoint distribution service (MMDS) spectrum at the beginning of the decade. While AT&T doesn't have any handy sub-10 GHz spectrum of its own, it is using unnamed experimental frequencies on loan from the FCC to test WiMAX in several scenarios, using several unnamed vendors' base station and CPE gear. Its four-tower network will be deployed in both downtown and suburban areas, targeting a wide variety of business and enterprise customers with Internet, private data and voice-over-IP services, said Sanford Brown, AT&T vice president of access product management.

“Feedback from our first trial in Middleton [N.J.,] was very encouraging to us,” Brown said. “It's become clear to us that this technology is more than just an access alternative.”

While most of WiMAX's activity has been focused in the unlicensed bands, particularly the 3.5 GHz international bands, vendors have begun to sniff out the U.S. markets. Several have already launched products in the 5.8 GHz unlicensed bands, used by most wireless ISPs in the U.S., and now they're looking into licensed spectrum.

At Supercomm 2005, Aperto Networks said it would launch products in the 2.5 GHz MMDS and 2.3 GHz WCS bands late this year. Alvarion also said it would have gear tuned to WCS and the 2.5 GHz to 2.7 GHz bands by early next year. Those bands square right with the bands owned by some of the telecom industry's most influential players, the RBOCs, which hold WCS spectrum, and the MMDS spectrum held by Sprint and Nextel and the Instructional Television Fixed Service (ITFS) bands controlled by the Craig McCaw venture Clearwire.

“This will really be the first time U.S. carriers can take a WiMAX product and deploy it in licensed bands for U.S. customers,” said Carlton O'Neal, vice president of marketing for Alvarion.

Aperto used Supercomm as the launch pad for its portfolio of “WiMAX-ready” gear, after resisting the urge for many months — an urge to which most other vendors succumbed — to come out with its WiMAX-track product ahead of final certification. Aperto unveiled three PacketMAX base stations, including a product based on Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) allowing the deployment of multiple radio technologies over a single chassis, as well as its element management system, named WaveMAX.

Aperto also released two CPE units, one for consumers and the other for businesses. The initial launch only supports international unlicensed frequencies, but Aperto officials said its products are the first to support the entire gamut of international unlicensed spectrum from 3.3 GHz to 3.8 GHz. Aperto's initial launch, though, doesn't support U.S. carriers, but Vice President of Marketing Alan Menezes said that would soon be rectified. Aperto will release radio gear for the licensed frequencies by year-end and would have a 5.8 GHz box prepped for launch in early 2006 with its two announced customers, US Wireless and TowerStream, Menezes said.

The most surprising vendor announcement came from a manufacturer that was never suspected of being a WiMAX player: Terabeam Wireless, the free-space optics company, announced it would integrate Fujitsu's 802.16d system on a chip — into a new line of base stations — that doesn't utilize high-frequency light but rather the 2 GHz to 11 GHz spectrum.

The mobile version of WiMAX, based on the IEEE 802.16e specification, is still in the standards process, and products aren't scheduled for commercial release until 2007. That didn't stop its backers from trying to build momentum for the technology's forthcoming debut. Mobile WiMAX is expected to make the technology a truly mass-market technology, adding initial portability and eventually mobility comparable to that offered by cellular.

Many vendors at Supercomm outlined their road maps for the technology at Supercomm, and at least one manufacturer, Nokia, made a surprise re-entry back into the WiMAX fold. After helping found the WiMAX Forum in 2003, Nokia dropped out of its membership roles, saying it was pursuing other technologies, but at the end of Supercomm 2005, Nokia stated it had rejoined the forum and was actively collaborating with Intel to jointly develop an 802.16e technology.

Another Intel collaborator, Alcatel, revealed more details of its WiMAX partnership at Supercomm. Martine Lapierre, Alcatel Mobile Communications Group's chief technology officer, said that Alcatel is actively developing a base station technology with Intel based on ATCA standards. The idea is to develop an architecture that allows carriers to plug WiMAX mobility cards into ATCA-certified radio access gear, allowing them to run WiMAX and cellular technology off the same base station. Lapierre said Alcatel and Intel are also using the road map to create a pico base station.

Meanwhile, Motorola is developing mobile WiMAX in two of its divisions. Its Canopy broadband wireless division is looking into the first three iterations of 802.16e-based WiMAX, which contains the first portability and high-capacity upgrades to the standard, said Kenny Isbister, senior product manager for licensed products for Canopy. Those products will be geared toward the enterprise markets that Canopy currently targets, but as the mobile WiMAX standard moves into its final iterations of bringing full mobility, Motorola will launch wide area networking products from its networks division, reflecting their compatibility with Motorola's cellular infrastructure lines, Isbister said.

Like most of the major network equipment providers, however, Motorola, Alcatel and Nokia are not pursuing a fixed Wireless WiMAX product. Although several of the large vendors have signed OEM agreements with 802.16d vendors such as Alvarion to have a WiMAX product in their portfolio, none are actively promoting the technology. In fact, many of the mobile WiMAX backers are questioning the fixed technology's viability. Alcatel's Lapierre said that fixed WiMAX's symmetrical uplink and downlink greatly limits its commercial potential, while mobile WiMAX's asymmetrical characteristics gives it much more mass-market appeal.

Motorola's Isbister said the vendor is going ahead with its Canopy line, which, though a proprietary technology, Motorola believes to be a superior fixed-wireless technology to WiMAX. Since fixed wireless deployments are by definition “fixed,” they don't necessitate handoff between different vendors' equipment. Although interoperability is nice, meeting the fixed WiMAX standard would require compromising some of the capabilities built into Canopy today, Isbister said.

“When you build a product to a standard, you see all the products homogenized,” Isbister said. “Even when the first 802.16e products come out, you'll see a decrease in capacity as all of the vendors work to meet the standard.”

In the case of mobile WiMAX, though, standards are vital, even if it means creating a lower common denominator, Isbister said. 802.16e technologies will be mobile and therefore must be interoperable, and they will target the mass market, meaning they will need the economies brought by scale standardization. From Motorola's perspective, though, “anything you can do with ‘d’ you can do with ‘e’, so we're going with ‘e’,” Isbister said.

The generational strife in the WiMAX Forum's ranks, however, was kept for the most part to a minimum at Supercomm 2005. Vendors large and small primarily kept to the marketing message, though they focused on their specific tracks of WiMAX's development. Most of them even took the forum's suggestion to stop referring to the first-generation of WiMAX technologies as “fixed” wireless technologies. “Fixed implies that it used to be broken,” said one forum member.

Opening up the pre-show sessions on Supercomm's Wi-Fi and WiMAX panel, Mo Shakouri, chairman of the forum's marketing working group, painted a very rosy picture for the possibilities of WiMAX for global broadband access. He listed regions of the world, most in developing nations where large swathes of the population had no access to DSL, cable modems or even basic Internet access. Shakouri correctly stated that all of those regions could be reached with WiMAX — though he was slightly prone to exaggeration.

“Broadband is growing, but in many areas of the world, people don't have access to it,” Shakouri said. “We believe access to information is as important as food.”