@WiMAX Forum Congress Americas ’09: Broadband capabilities highlighted on Day 2

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Unlike the first official day of this week’s WiMAX Forum Congress America’s ’09, Day 2 was a virtual LTE-free zone, except for the occasional remarks that LTE would not be all it’s cracked up to be. (Hey, there’s a reason LTE is not in the show’s title.)
However, like the first day, Day 2 of the event kicked off with a talk from a government representative, this time from John Leibovitz, deputy chief of the wireless telecommunication bureau at the Federal Communications Commission.
Leibovitz used his keynote address to tout the agency’s progress in stimulating the growth of mobile broadband services, including the recent “shot clock” decision designed to quicken the pace of cell tower deployments. Leibovitz noted that in July 2008 more than 20% of new site applications were taking more than a year to have a decision made, and that almost half of those were requests for collocation. The new guidelines call for collocation requests to be rendered in 90 days or less, and for all other tower requests to be made within 150 days.
Leibovitz also acknowledged the need for more spectrum to support the expected boom in mobile broadband adoption. Citing a recent Cisco Systems report that showed consumer demand will increase dramatically through 2015 and the fact that only a small amount of additional spectrum is currently scheduled to be freed up for mobile services, Leibovitz noted the FCC was looking at ways to bridge the shortfall.
“Is a 3-times increase in spectrum enough to handle a 450-times increase in data usage?,” Leibovitz asked rhetorically.
While spectrum will be the foundation for advanced mobile broadband networks, Mark Pagon, CEO of regional WiMAX provider Xanadoo, said there was also a need for more advanced devices that can lure consumers into signing up for such offerings. Pagon cited smartphones as a potential product that could drive such demand as accompanying applications stores could provide applications that take advantage of the higher-speed networks.
Dell Inc.’s CTO of Business Client & SMB, Liam Quinn, chipped in from device manufacturers saying they would be interested in embedding more technologies, like WiMAX, into devices if the chipset manufacturers could further integrate such functionality into current chip designs. Quinn also said there could be further adoption of WiMAX into devices if the WiMAX Forum worked more closely with established partners like the Wi-Fi Alliance.
Cable competition
One company set to rapidly expand its mobile presence is Comcast Corp., which has invested heavily into Clearwire Corp.’s WiMAX business and recently began rolling out access to the WiMAX network through its branded mobile virtual network operator-based service.
Dave Williams, senior VP of wireless technology at Comcast, said the company is seeing changes in the way its traditional cable customer wants to view their content.
“People want to access everything from everywhere, so we have to change to that,” Williams said, adding the company is working to implement its “any content, any place, any time, any device, any network” model for the future.
As proof of the changing habits of consumers, Williams said that usage of the company’s digital video recorder offering is up 40% year-over-year. “People are getting used to watching what they want, when they want,” Williams explained.
To serve that change, Comcast sees great potential in Clearwire’s capabilities, with Williams highlighting both the WiMAX network’s speed capabilities, but more importantly the carrier’s spectrum depth that can handle the rush to video services being delivered wirelessly.
While Comcast does have a deal with Sprint Nextel Corp. to offer voice services as part of a bundled offering, Williams said the company is more interested in the data capabilities of the WiMAX service that seem to tie in better with Comcast’s video and cable Internet offerings.
“We really only want to play in wireless data at this time,” Williams said. “That is where growth is.”
Comcast has a sorted history in the mobile voice space, first as an operator in the 90s of a network in the Northeast that was eventually sold to AT&T, and more recently through the doomed Pivot deal with Sprint Nextel that fell apart shortly after it was formed.
Comcast also has a stake in a joint venture that spent nearly $2.4 billion on 137 spectrum licenses covering almost 270 million potential customers during the FCC’s AWS auction. There are build out requirements that mandate those licenses be put to use or they will have to be forfeited back to the FCC.
Another area in wireless that Comcast has seen strong growth is in the backhaul market, which is expected to see continued growth going forward as higher-speed data networks continue to proliferate.
“One of our fastest growing businesses is fiber-based backhaul,” Williams said. “It has been pretty successful so far and we intend to grow that business from 2010 onwards.”