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Operator alliances are important to start-up carriers, especially those with big ambitions - they support combined purchasing power, shared expertise and software development, and of course roaming for international clients. Three of the key flagwavers for Mobile WiMAX - Clearwire, Japan's UQ and Russia's Yota - have announced a roaming agreement, on the eve of the 4G World conference, taking place in Chicago this week.

This deal builds on previous breakthroughs in cooperation, some made under the auspices of Barry West - now Clearwire's president, international - who took on responsibility for evangelizing WiMAX and extending Clearwire's international influence, when new CEO Bill Morrow arrived earlier this year. Already, in June, the US operator announced interoperability and roaming trials with a group of 14 providers, and West has a particularly keen eye on India and even China.

For now, the three pioneers have signed a memorandum of understanding to work towards international roaming. "With over 500 WiMAX deployments under way in about 145 countries, the existence of a roaming framework - helping to connect operators as well as WiMAX customers - is vital to advanced cross-market cooperation," said West in a statement.

Clearwire is also working to ensure roaming interoperability with four other carriers in its Global Alliance Partner Program - YTL Communications of Malaysia, wi-tribe of Pakistan, Vee Telecom of Taiwan and Global Mobile of Taiwan. When necessary, the collaboration will use guidelines created by the WiMAX Forum to handle roaming guidelines, specifications and templates.

The Intel/Google-backed operator was also reiterating its enthusiasm for wireless backhaul, with CTO John Saw saying that 90% of its cell sites are now linked by wireless IP, with fiber in place mainly for aggregation. Its primary backhaul vendor is DragonWave, and it also uses equipment from Motorola, plus Ciena for base station switching. As reported in Telephony, Clearwire uses wireless backhaul links that provide 30 Mbps or greater capacity (equivalent to 20 or more T1 lines). "We see demand at each site easily going up to 100Mbps," he said. "30 Mbps is not enough. It's just enough to get started."

DragonWave is hearing that message loud and clear, having unveiled a new high capacity IP radio capable of supporting a 4Gbps link using dual polarized radios, though this has still to go through trials before going commercial next year. The Horizon Quantum will be important in areas where there is little fiber available and wireless has to be moved further back into the core, where multi-gigabit capacity will be essential to support 4G classes of traffic. Clearwire, which has adopted a multi-faceted MVNO model for its access network, could even look to supply transport for third party operators too over its all-IP system, some analysts have pointed out.

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