Cooperation key to rollout

A quick stroll of the show floor reveals all sorts of flashy gadgetry and eye-popping mobile applications. But the executives behind Sprint Nextel Corp.’s Xohm would rather talk about the ecosystem than about megabits per second.
WiMAX is a substantial technological step forward for the mobile industry, of course. The stuff has remarkable spectral efficiency, is highly scalable and offers impressive upload and download speeds. Sprint Nextel will spend as much as $5 billion to build out its WiMAX network, with the first markets of Chicago, Baltimore and Washington coming online by the end of the year.
No matter how you pronounce, it though, Xohm is all about cooperation, according to CTO Barry West. “We’re opening up the network so anybody can take chipsets, can create devices, and offer services,” said West, who pronounced the brand as “ex-ohm” Wednesday morning but had adopted the correct “zoam” by the afternoon roundtable.
Indeed, the breadth and depth of WiMAX’s backers may be its biggest advantage. The 6-year-old WiMAX Forum claims nearly 500 member companies, including heavy-hitting “board members” such as Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp., Intel Corp. and Samsung. And all those players have helped established the technological blueprint upon which Xohm will be built.
“The great thing about WiMAX is that there’s a WiMAX Forum,” said Sue Spradley of Nokia Siemens Networks during Wednesday afternoon’s roundtable on the Xohm ecosystem. “There’s a set of standards and compatibilities that we’ve all signed on to.”
The WiMAX Forum certifies products from hardware manufacturers and other vendors, ensuring the wares are fully interoperable and support both fixed and mobile services. All base stations and subscribers stations claiming to be “WiMAX compliant” must be certified by the group, which expects mobile networks to provide up to 15 Mbps of capacity within a typical cell radius of up t three kilometers.
But it’s not just high-tech players from the telecom space that have joined the WiMAX caravan. WiMAX Forum members also include Warner Music Group, Walt Disney and AOL. Consumer electronics manufacturers are increasingly eyeing the technology as a way to add connectivity to all sorts of devices, and WiMAX will draw attention from application developers as networks come online around the world.
“The consumer electronics industry has been heavily involved (in WiMAX) for at least the last 15 months, 18 months,” said Intel Corp.’s Sean Maloney. “And there are so many applications on the Web that are just pent up, waiting to come to mobile devices.”
Xohm’s kumbaya-style strategy is perhaps best illustrated by its alliance with Google Inc. Most mobile network carriers are terrified of the Internet giant, but Xohm has tapped Google to create an Internet portal that will give users easy access to Gmail, Google Talk and other Web services.
Xohm is certain to lose some precious “ownership of the customer” by granting Google what amounts to prime placement on the deck. But Xohm will leverage the most important asset any carrier has: the network, and all the information that can be gleaned from it.
“Google is the 800-pound gorilla, but every 800-pound gorilla was a 50-pound gorilla at one stage,” West said. “It’s not a dumb pipe; it’s a very smart pipe.”