Despite recent setbacks like the Sprint/Clearwireroaming deal dissolution last month, 2008 is still being touted as the year of WiMax -- at least by the companies with the largest stake in the long-range wireless technology.
It came as no surprise then that Motorola, a major player in global WiMax initiatives, downplayed the recent troubles in WiMax land by saying they would ultimately have little to no impact on rollout and availability next year.
"With respect to Sprint/Clearwire, the announcement (that) they had broken off their relationship means we simply go back to the status quo," explained Fred Wright, senior vice president of Cellular Networks and Broadband at Motorola, during a Monday morning teleconference.
"The two are simply just going to build out their own (respective) markets."
Wright's definition of "status quo" must be interesting. As it stands, the still leaderless Sprint is currently facing a growing number of shareholders who believe the company should abandon its WiMax plans altogether and focus instead on its core wireless services, digesting Nextel and holding onto its subscribers.
Photo: Flickr/jldevicente
Then there's the fact that Clearwire -- the only other major WiMax carrier in the U.S. -- is not exactly in the best position to invest millions of dollars in buildout. While the fledgling company did receive a huge capital infusion from both Intel (to the tune of $600
million) and Motorola in July of 2006, Clearwire still runs into cash problems fairly regularly because of the expensive infrastructure investments its required to make. The company even said that continued financial would be essential for it to survive during its latest Q3 earnings statement.
Perhaps because of these worrisome developments, Motorola remains vague about when the company will even be releasing WiMax-enabled handsets.
During the call, Andy McKinnon, Motorola's WiMax principal for the
EMEA region, said that the availability of handsets is ultimately market driven. "As the market is ready, we will respond to it," he said. "You need the infrastructure rolled out for the handset to take advantage of WiMax."
But that's the whole point, right? WiMax backers like Intel and
Motorola have all been saying that 2008 will finally be the year that sufficient infrastructure is in place...that the market will be ready.
And while Intel and various laptop makers have committed to releasing
WiMax-enabled laptops by mid-2008, it seems strange that Motorola, a company so confident about the big debut of WiMax next year, wouldn't have concrete plans for WiMax handsets.
All of this reminds me of Intel's "red face test." When the chipmaker first debuted Wi-Fi enabled laptops to the world as part of its Centrino platform, it used this RFT test to figure out how many hotspots were necessary before the company could claim that the technology was ready for prime time -- without being laughed at. In the end, the answer turned out to be over 30,000 worldwide and Intel in fact launched it's Wi-Fi-enabled laptops with about 50,000 hotspots in existence.
Apparently, Intel does not have the same test for the WiMAX
deployment, but no company wants to release products that consumers can't use. Sure, there's the ongoing WiMax trials, and cities like
Portland and Chicago are on track to launch commercial WiMax services in the middle of next year. But is that going to be enough to justify commercial products. Given the shaky foundations at both Sprint and
Clearwire, it's certainly not a sure thing. Why companies can't just come out and say this...I have no idea.
