Cisco and Tata join WiMAX Forum board

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Cisco and Tata join WiMAX Forum board

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 2 June, 2009

READ MORE: WiMAX

Cisco's intensified interest in WiMAX, following its far-reaching agreement with Clearwire, has been a good boost of confidence in the technology, at a time when it has a battle to grab the limelight from LTE. And as the WiMAX Forum gathered for its annual European Global Congress in Amsterdam this week, it could boast further support from the IP giant, as Cisco joined the Forum board of directors.

Sai Subramanian will be Cisco's representative, joining another high profile new director, Prateek Pashine, who represents Indian operator Tata. The appointment of Pashine emphasizes the huge role that the subcontinent is expected to play in the WiMAX industry, once its own spectrum licenses are auctioned, and also as companies like Tata look to expand in other parts of the world using new technologies. Subramanian, meanwhile, is a veteran of the mobile broadband space, having been the head of product management and marketing at Navini, which Cisco acquired in 2007 to be the basis of its WiMAX infrastructure business. The former Navini system is in commercial service with about 20 operators such as Xanadoo in the US and several players in the former Soviet states, and Cisco plans to launch its first WiMAX devices, under the Linksys brand, later this year.

The changing make-up of the Forum's board indicates the shifting priorities of mobile broadband. Most of the founding fathers of WiMAX are still there of course - such as Airspan, Alvarion, Aperto, Motorola and of course Intel - but there is greater representation of operators (BT, Clearwire, Comcast, KDDI, KT and Sprint); tier one vendors, even those mainly associated with 3G (such as Alcatel-Lucent); device makers like Nokia and Samsung. Another indicative sign is the preponderance of Asian players as, with some notable exceptions like Clearwire, the center of gravity moves east. Fujitsu, Huawei, Taiwan's ITRI research organization, KDDI, KT, Samsung, ZTE and Tata all hail from Asia, and make up almost half the board.

The Forum said there are now 472 commercial WiMAX deployments in 139 countries. The largest number is in Europe (145 in 40 countries); followed by CALA (95 in 29 countries), Africa (92 in 37 nations), Asia-Pacific (61 in 18 countries), North America (40 deployments) and the Middle East (16 networks in nine states). There is high momentum, executives said, in Latin America and Africa, with India on the horizon, and increasingly operators are looking at innovative business models to generate higher value and ROI than conventional data services alone.

The embedding of wireless in a huge range of products from consumer devices to M2M systems is a big opportunity for WiMAX operators, especially if they have low cost spectrum, perhaps in 3.5GHz. This can be enhanced further when combined with economic stimulus funding in many countries, as discussed by several US localized providers such as DigitalBridge.

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