WiMAX is Center Stage Early On at CTIA

Bernie — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:50:00 -0400

WiMAX has a lot of early attention at this year’s CTIA show, going on now in Las Vegas. There is much anticipation surrounding the potential partnership between Sprint, Clearwire, and a variety of cable MSOs to finally bring Xohm home. In other early news about WiMAX, Xanadoo LLC announced the launch of WiMAX service in Springfield, Illinois. Xanadoo is the first carrier to utilize Cisco’s WiMAX solution, which it obtained after recently acquiring Navini Networks. Xanadoo serves four other markets in Texas and Oklahoma with about 14,000 subscribers, which they will eventually migrate over to WiMAX technology.

In other WiMAX news from CTIA, the WiMAX Forum released a report projecting more than 133 million WiMAX users globally by 2012. It also reaffirmed that the first Mobile WiMAX Certified products are expected to achieve certification in Q2 2008. Additionally, the forum estimates that by 2011 there will be more than 1,000 Mobile WiMAX Forum Certified products found throughout the world. Of course all of this news pales in comparison to the anticipation of learning about Sprint’s WiMAX plans. They are the lead horse in North America, and are widely considered to provide a make or break scenario for WiMAX on this continent. For the time being, the competitive implications of WiMAX on the U.S. telecom landscape ride on Sprint’s moves.

CTIA: Not So Fast on Whitespace Google

Bernie — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:25:13 -0400

CTIA and the wireless service providers they represent, weighed in on the wireless white space spectrum debate, and their view is squarely counter to Google’s. CTIA says wireless white space spectrum should be auctioned and licensed, not designated as unlicensed as Google advocates. Google made a lot of noise earlier this week with an ex-parte letter to the FCC, urging that white space spectrum should be unlicensed and used for wireless broadband applications. Wireless white space is spectrum allocated to television channels between 2 and 51. It’s great spectrum for broadband wireless and will come into serious play after the 2009 digital TV transition (although some of it is free now, depending on geography).

CTIA argues that licensing the spectrum is the surest way to reduce interference potential. That argument does have some validity. But it also doesn’t hurt that CTIA’s largest members are probably in the best position to win that extremely valuable spectrum at auction. If it goes unlicensed, interference issues aside, it could empower a variety of competitors for the likes of Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint, among others. Depending on your perspective, that could be good or bad. CTIA would fall in the “bad” category and hence will push hard for some form of licensing.