Today in Fierce Wireless, Dan O’Shea hit the nail on the head when he summed up the state of the current US broadband market stating that it was in a state of ‘great change”. Finally, someone that just says what most have been knowing and feeling. Dan says it best in his article, but essentially he poetically lays out the scenario we all know has been looming – “telco and cable TV customers are moving to one another’s services, DSL adoption growth is declining and average citizens are trying to figure out how to keep broadband services in their dwindling household budgets”.
This week we will most likely see a of groundbreaking WiMAX news coming out of WiMAX World and Telephony Live both in Chicago. And this week also marks the roll out of Sprint Nextel’s long awaited WiMAX service in Baltimore – eyes open on that.
Finally – first they are and then they aren’t – then they got a new CEO who doesn’t get WiMAX and then everyone is all in a tizzy and now they are back on, again – it’s like the girl at the prom who is the biggest tease, only this time its with the thing we all want – or think we want – WiMAX. According to the great article in MCN, even though WiMax is pretty new technology some industry wonks and gurus believe it will surpass Wi-Fi – which the article’s reporter Mike Farrell humorously states is “the current wireless-broadband flavor of the day.” God we love that phrase!
And thank you Mike for writing a piece of news that actually is based around, uh, THE NEWS! It’s just common sense actually – one WiMax tower gives us groveling early adopters of this cool technology over a 30-mile radius, compared to only a four- to six-mile radius for Wi-Fi – and if that doesn’t resonate with those of you that actually like to say use words like WiFi and WiMax but don’t actually know what it means – it REALLY means that WiMAX is faster which means more stuff can get to you quicker. Like Mobile TV!
Now, is the time for a little talk about disruptive technologies affecting the increasingly converging telco and broadcasting worlds – and by disruptive we mean creating new revenue streams, business models and opportunities – hybrid delivery systems – video as a ubiquitous media. We want to talk about WiMAX in a non techy, analyst way. We aren’t experts on the WiMAX topic, nor did we conduct any polls, analysis or other official tests on the subject – we just want to talk about it. (that was a disclaimer if you hadn’t picked up on that)
But first we want you to look to a French company called UDcast (and yes they are a client) who has been silently driving and creating Mobile TV standards along side Alcatel (DVB-SH) and Nokia (DVB-H) for the past several years. This is not a sexy topic, nor does the consumer care about it. It isn’t even talked about very much outside of the symposiums or techy trade journals, but it is impossible to deliver Mobile TV without those standards and Mobile TV would not be where it is today — moving from trial into commercial deployments generating real revenue and real usage.
My brother lives out West in Idaho (this is another bone of contention so we won’t go there, he was taken there by Love) and he loves technology – loves gadgets, is an early adopter of it all – he has Mobile TV and loves it, loves to talk to everyone about it and show the rest of our family how in the stone ages they are (which they are). But on a recent visit we were talking and he was going on about it and I said to him I bet you don’t know how you get this MobileTV of yours and he says to me “who cares, I have it.
This brings us back to WiMAX. According to a recent report on December 3, 2007 by Infonetics, the number of worldwide fixed and mobile WiMAX subscribers is expected to skyrocket to close to 60 million in 2010, led by the Asia Pacific region. Sprint entered the market (and mostly exited again), Cisco entered the market, carriers like Vodafone and NTT are rolling out and the ITU recently added WiMAX as an approved 3G technology into its official IMT-2000 standards – which essentially gave it a long term shelf life.
In a recent article about Mobile WiMAX in InformationWeek they address the growth of the market and the things that need to emerge in order for it to take off. And this week, another article in InformationWeek announced that now Motorola had expanded its WiMAX equipment line up signaling yet another step foward for the technology.
So what does this have to do with UDcast and WiMAX? Right now in the US, there is a trial of WiMAX, its a DVB-SH, hybrid Mobile TV service that was announced by CleareWire and ICO. UDcast provides the core components for the DVB-SH system. ICO will launch its DVB-SH satellite in March 2008. UDcast provides DVB-SH IP Encapsulators (enabling broadcasting of IP TV), and DVB-SH network management. And this is important because in order to roll out more WiMAX deployments these carriers rely on technology that can deliver the service to the end user and as industry runs at lightening speed to get these new TV services out to the consumer, development of the back end technology to make this happen is silently being disruptive.
The man behind the WiMAX curtain can bring to operators new ways to generate revenue including targeted advertising and content, essentially infusing next generation TV into the MobileTV ecosystem. We think that is pretty cool – to see a market evolve right before your very eyes and not even think about why it is happening. It’s like the guys who climb skyscrapers to change out the light bulbs on the towers — all you know is that the lights are always on.
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