WiMax's bright future and five hurdles to overcome

Computerworld - Last month's WiMax World 2007 conference in Chicago was filled with old-fashioned technology optimism, featuring twice as many vendors and visitors as the previous year's event along with new details of Sprint Nextel Corp.'s nationwide Xohm WiMax rollout for next year. One balmy evening, Sprint and Motorola Corp. executives toasted the future of the technology aboard a Chicago River boat cruise to demonstrate how well the wireless broadband technology works.

The future could hardly have seemed brighter for WiMax technology that night, with a $5 billion, multiyear investment in Xohm expected to catapult WiMax generally. The performance of the broadband wireless technology, designed to boost speeds to all kinds of devices over greater distances than Wi-Fi, had been an uncertainty but was now being revealed.

For some analysts and others who mostly disregarded the Chicago hoopla, there are still obstacles that WiMax will face prior to widespread adoption.

A potentially serious factor could be what impact the recent resignation of Gary Foresee as Sprint's chairman and CEO will have on the Xohm division. Xohm has a spirited backer with Barry West, Sprint's chief technology officer, as its president, who could insulate Xohm from Sprint overall.

But Philip Marshall, an analyst at Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston, said West now must get support from the financial community outside of Sprint. "Without this [support], a new Sprint CEO might opt to back away from Gary's strong support for WiMax," Marshall said.

Of course, WiMax is much more than just Sprint's Xohm version of WiMax, with many vendors in the market already. Even so, it still faces some obstacles that range from concerns over pricing of WiMax devices, chips and network services to whether WiMax speeds of 2Mbit/sec. to 4Mbit/sec. will even matter when compared with other emerging broadband wireless technologies.

There are at least five concerns for WiMax promoters to face, according to technology analysts and the vendors:

1.What will it cost?

The prices that will be charged for WiMax chips, devices and network services are the key worry when examining WiMax's future. Pricing is clearly on the minds of the service providers, including West, who is expected to announce Xohm pricing after the first of next year.

West made headlines earlier this year for claiming costs for WiMax networks could be one-tenth of competing wireless networks. But will that savings be passed to end users?

In an interview at WiMax World, West said prices for hardware such as a WiMax laptop card would approximate the cost of a Wi-Fi laptop card, while a monthly subscription might approximate that of residential cable or DSL service. "It will be affordable," he said.