WiMAX is like having DSL in the palm of your hands, and it will soon be a widespread reality, Jaime Borras, corporate vice president and senior fellow for Motorola’s WiMAX, iDEN Advanced Development and Technology Specialty Platforms, Mobile Devices, told the crowd at the VON show today. From Motorola’s perspective, convergence is taking the industry towards a future replete with WiMAX, which Borras said is very doable over handsets.

“Our vision on seamless mobility is really to enable you, the user, to be able to access your media, your data, anywhere, anytime you need it,” Borras said. “As you move from one network to another, your voice, as well as your medium, does not get interrupted. It gets switched to the appropriate network, and at that time, the user doesn’t notice the change.”

Borras defined convergence as taking voice and all the multimedia services together and putting them into different networks and devices. He cited the statistic that each second sees the birth of only four newborns but the sale of 25 mobile phones – a number he expects to double or triple in the next few years.

“If we start off with the landscape, we can see that video data and voice is being really used completely different today than it used to be in the past,” Borras said. “All of the telcos and MSOs are really coming together and using different models and expanding into different areas. Telcos are expanding into video as well as cable providing voice and also moving into the cellular space.”

Borras echoed many of the themes that have been undercurrent at VON this week, including that the user experience is key in any deployment, WiMAX or otherwise.

“When we look at the architecture to do [WiMAX], we realize that it is really all about experience,” he said. “The user needs to feel at ease doing everything he can do sitting down at home on the laptop, on the go.”

As consumers move from prime time to “my time,” Borras said, experience drivers for the user will include on-demand services and value-added applications that make consumers feel more comfortable. This includes applications that WiMAX enables, such as sharing live experiences, music and video from their mobile handsets.

“WiMAX is really based on IP, which brings us into the simplicity of the network and the low latency of the network, as well as being able to get content and applications well routed and accessible to the user,” Borras said. “It also provides the capacity, spectrum and cost to support the performance levels required for mobile broadband.

“It is really all about the low latency to be able to communicate and have these shifts between the different sessions,” he added.

Motorola is currently doing 30 active trials and 20 pending trials of WiMAX throughout the world. Borras said this is driven by the convergence of wireline and wireless, digitization, as well as the explosion of broadband availability.

“Our strength…is in the consumer domain as well as the access transport capability and then the distribution for the networks we are setting up for IPTV as well as cable,” Borras said. “We have actually gone out there and leveraged some new acquisitions (including Broadbus, Vertasent and Tut Systems) that would really help us build additional strength throughout the total end-to-end value chain.”

Borras concluded that the goal with WiMAX is to achieve a simpler user experience through seamless communication on the go anytime, anywhere to improve the user’s quality of life, while the challenge will be to make it user-friendly and let the user direct how they make the most of the content and applications.