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WiMAX has always had a tough job to make its voice heard loudly at Mobile World Congress, because of the show's roots in the 3G community, and this year was always going to be particularly hard, because of the wave of momentum behind LTE, as it reaches the peak of the hype curve. WiMAX enjoyed that place on the curve a couple of years ago, and now has to take a different approach, which the ecosystem has addressed enthusiastically at MWC, giving the technology a profile beyond what many expected.

Tuesday morning saw Intel hosting a panel of the great and the good of WiMAX, with senior executives from major vendors joining 802.16's great cheerleader, Intel's senior VP and CMO Sean Maloney. These were asked the question: 'What game changing WiMAX initiative will your company deliver in 2009?' Many of the responses focused on the wider WiMAX story, and if listeners were hoping for promises of killer devices or significant standards upgrades, they would have been disappointed. In fact, changing the game is all about 'growing up' - placing WiMAX in a wide and mature ecosystem and delivering end-to-end systems cost effectively and flexibly. In a recession, dramatic new technology enhancements are to be mistrusted, bringing risk and potential delay - and downturn makes a virtue out of the duller focuses, on ready availability of equipment, a broadening ecosystem, and on harnessing what is already there (Wi-Fi devices, for instance, in Clearwire's case).

So Alvarion and Cisco were attacking the end-to-end issue from different standpoints, each stressing that working with partners or other parts of their own firm would deliver a solid IP core story for WiMAX as well as a widening range of device alternatives. Motorola was also focusing on proliferating its CPE types to suit a whole range of operator and consumer requirements in emerging and mature economies, and on leveraging the Wi-Fi installed base in the home and laptop. Nokia Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent have both been reported in recent months to be backing away from WiMAX, and clearly their most important target customer base lies with the major cellcos, whose natural bent in many cases will be to adopt HSPA and eventually LTE. But ALU's WiMAX VP Karim El Naggar and NSN's head of radio access strategy Markku Ellila were both vehement that WiMAX was a full commitment, and again, stressed the theme of widening the range of supported business cases, from simple fixed access to embedded or machine-to-machine networks to full open web applications - and so appealing to operators from outside the traditional cellular handset structure. And ZTE and Huwaei were both aggressive about supporting the entire range of wireless platforms, according to operator requirements.

So, coexistence with 2G and Wi-Fi; flexibility and openness of model; a steady increase in the range of devices (with a focus on affordability and time to market); and the maintenance of a two-year market availability lead on LTE - these seem to be the credo of WiMAX in 2009, and all these points are designed to play to the needs of operators facing capital crunch and consumer slowdown.

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