WiMAX World: It’s all about demand

CHICAGO – Welcome to the beginning of a couple of days of technology, turmoil and transition, as various players of the wireless ecosystem dissect WiMAX technology and its role in tomorrow’s marketplace.
Against the backdrop of Sprint Nextel Corp.’s commercial WiMAX deployment in Baltimore, speakers at yesterday’s 4G Executive Summit debated technologies, speeds, latency and of course, business models.
While the technologies are new – and as AT&T Hank Kafka pointed out, not yet officially approved by all the standards bodies – LTE and and WiMAX both promise to deliver the beginning of a revolution for mobile wireless broadband. (I’m ready! Sign me up.)
But revolutions often come with some pain, and this one shouldn’t be any different. The stock market is unstable; the merger between Sprint Nextel and Clearwire has yet to be completed (it’s already fallen apart once); and LTE proponents dismiss WiMAX as a niche technology. Fourth-generation technology is not yet the land of milk and honey.
But we’ve been here before, and not all that long ago. The wireless industry is always ahead of the market. Customers have embraced texting, but streaming video could be the future.
Huawei’s Charlie Martin reminisced about trying to sell 2G technology to a marketplace when they couldn’t define how people would use the applications; that certainly was a more difficult proposition. Today, the problem is the opposite: end users know what they want. And they want it the way they want it – which usually includes in an incredibly easy format that is reasonably priced, Martin noted.
Getting there is going to take some trial and error. The focused, and the lucky, will thrive. Some companies will bet wrong; some innovative companies will likely see their ideas “borrowed” and implemented better by stronger companies. There will be bankruptcies and success stories.
But wireless broadband will be a reality. Because people demand it. It’s that simple.