The major European operators may remain firmly attached to LTE in their core territories, but they are increasingly looking to adopt WiMAX where it can help them gain a foothold in new markets. Telefonica and Telecom Italia are active with 802.16e projects in Latin America, while Orange and Vodafone are both starting to deploy systems in Africa. France Telecom’s Orange is particularly aggressive, with plans to deploy WiMAX in at least 20 African countries.
Before the holiday, Unwired became a takeover target for TV and telephony service provider Seven Network. It was widely expected that the company would also acquire the WiMAX licenses and activities of pay TV operator Austar, which has a spectrum partnership with Unwired. However, this week Austar announced that instead it would sell its interests to Opel Ventures, a joint venture of second telco Optus and rural service provider Elders, for AUD 65 million ($568m).
The initial list of bidders in US spectrum auctions is always far more fascinating than the list of eventual winners, which tends to be the usual suspects, but the 700MHz event may throw up a couple of surprises. Google has stated that it will bid alone, but, should it gain licenses is widely expected to work with a partner on creating and rolling out its planned open access, wholesale model. This would offer expansionist operators from outside the US a golden opportunity, and currently all eyes are on Korea and Japan.
Despite the natural fit of 802.16e with its IP heritage, its core network business and its push into Wi-Fi metrozones, Cisco has sat on the fence about WiMAX for years. However once the acquisition of advanced mobile WiMAX start-up Navini Networks closes, this will change. Last week the IP giant briefed analysts on where the new addition would fit into its strategy and portfolio.
WiMAX operator UK Broadband, a subsidiary of Hong Kong giant PCCW, has scored a major victory in its often tortured plans to provide mobile broadband services across Britain. The UK regulator, Ofcom, has said it will amend the provider’s 3.4GHz license to allow full mobile hand-off, enabling the company to offer a wider range of services on its Mobile WiMAX network.
Portable WiMAX devices are coming to market now as Samsung showed last week with two new products - a smartphone/PDA and an Ultra Mobile Windows PC, plus two accessories that will turn any laptop or desktop into a WiMAX compatible computer.
Among the clamor of some financial analysts for Sprint to get out of WiMAX to focus on short term strategies that would boost earnings, Sprint has issued statements that they remain strongly committed to deploying WiMAX. Clearwire is not a WiMAX service company at this time. But Clearwire does represent a directly significant development that indicates a major factor in WiMAX' success, namely the aggregation of diverse spectrum licenses into large coverage area networks.
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