Vendors Urge Cable to Expand Service Areas, Quad Play Concepts Using WiMAX
SAN FRANCISCO -- WiMAX offers a great way for cable companies to broaden service offerings and extend service territories, said executives of vendors, including Motorola. Cable companies are looking at WiMAX to expand their service areas, said Manish Gupta, marketing & alliances vp for Aperto Networks, on a panel Tues. at the wVoIP conference here. Wade Alt, Mobile Satellite Ventures’ sales & strategic channels vp, agreed, saying foreign carriers could use the technology to enter the U.S. market.
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Cable companies need to look more broadly upon quadruple play, to making all home communications services mobile rather than simply tacking cellular service onto fixed voice, video and data offerings, said Dave Gaetani, business development dir.-Motorola Connected Home Solutions. The conventional view is “really the wrong way to think” about the opportunity, he said. The broader conception “is where WiMAX becomes integral, and so does 3G,” Gaetani said.
But “3G has some serious limitations… The 3G networks do an okay job [with advanced video functions like PVR], depending on how many customers are on the network,” Gaetani said: “WiMAX solves that problem.” Wi-Fi and WiMAX become logical extensions of service for cable companies, given their access to poles, power on them and fixed-line broadband, said Gaetani.
Nothing inherent in WiMAX technology makes it unsuitable for Advanced Wireless Service spectrum cable recently bought in the FCC auction, Aperto’s Gupta said. But that spectrum isn’t “maximized” for WiMAX, said Alt. Any cable company that goes with a “narrowband” wireless technology like CDMA will signal its judgment that voice is “the most compelling immediate mobility opportunity,” he said. Choosing WiMAX would mean it sees voice as just a piece of the opportunity, Alt said.
A U.S. carrier will announce a nationwide WiMAX rollout using unlicensed spectrum within 3 months, Gupta predicted without identifying the provider. But it will be more than 3 years before even early-mover Sprint sees substantial consumer uptake of WiMAX, he admitted. Meanwhile, carriers will start offering voice over Wi-Fi with WiMAX backhaul by mid-2007, said Ed Taulbee, Tropos Networks’ carrier markets dir.