On that very same day, the Federal Communications Commission, the US Federal regulator of all things telecom and cable, approved the merger between Sprint's WiMAX Division and Clearwire; thus clearing the way for the first major WiMAX entity to offer the new wireless broadband standard to the bandwidth hungry in the United States. This is a historic milestone since now the major sponsors of WiMAX have a clear route to establish it as an alternative to consumers from the weakening morass of traditional wireless offerings that do not scale and do not offer all in one products and pricing, the new holy grail in communications.
The newly created venture under Clearwire will be headed by Barry West, formerly the CTO of Sprint's short lived Xohm Division. The new venture counts with a formidable alliance of backers that have gone all in to establish WiMAX as a leading provider of wireless broadband within the borders of the US.
The first beneficiaries will be Google and Intel who will have a local live test bed for their compelling set of advanced products. Google is looking to deploy its new Android operating system for wireless devices as it seeks to supplant Symbian as the preferred platform for mobile devices. Intel, WiMAX's patron, will introduce a plethora of WiMAX ready devices from laptops to desktop USBs that will hit the market in 2009. Nokia, samsung and Motorola will spring forth a set of new products to take up the WiMAX space. Without compelling new devices, WiMAX will not take hold with American consumers.
The second group of beneficiaries will be the cable companies, Time Warner and Comcast, whose marketing of VOIP services has been a wild success and now have their appetite whetted for cellular under the WiMAX brand. This now allows the cablecos to offer quadruple play adding wireless mobile broadband to the telephony, video and wired internet services they now offer to their customers. Even modest success here will upend the current boundaries and barriers to entry constructed by the traditional telcos. The WiMAX partnership hopes to tear down the walls as users opt for new ways to access the Internet through mobile devices with the same success as the iPhone has done for AT&T.
Verizon and AT&T will soon discover the limits of their CDMA based strategies and the error of promising migration to LTE as a substitute to WiMAX in the coming years. Each successful encroachment by the WiMAX alliance is bound to cause consternation and hand wringing on the part of network designers who were too conservative in their thinking and too timid in their adoption of wireless broadband alternatives. While AT&T has increased its subscriber base on the back of the iPhone wave, these gains will be limited as the consumer appetite for faster than 3G speeds gains momentum worldwide.
Hopefully consumers will be offered access to high speed broadband and a set of integrated services that will reduce the huge bills for separate billing of their cellphone, cable and telephony services. Affordabilty... wow, what a concept!!!
