While Motorola is shedding other network businesses such as GSM/UMTS, it has been building a substantial business in the WiMAX space. In the last year, it’s announced some of the largest contracts in the industry, including Sprint, ClearWire and Wateen Telecom in Pakistan. Dan Coombes, chief technology officer of Motorola, recently spoke with Telephony’s Kevin Fitchard to discuss developments in the WiMAX space and what the industry can expect from this fast-growing sector going forward.

On WiMAX being both a broadband network and mobile network: One of strengths of WiMAX technology is that it’s IP friendly. It was designed from the beginning to support IP services. Voice over IP is gaining popularity around the world—you’re seeing it on cable systems, seeing it on DSL. WiMAX enables voice over IP, allowing customers to have a lot more flexibility in their services as they go forward. They can have a single service for a mobile situation as well as for fixed applications.

Another strength is that WiMAX truly is a mobile system. It has the hand-off capability that cellular does, and it’s going to offer a high-quality mobile experience for both voice and data, whether you’re driving around the street or driving around the country. You’ll be able to roam from system to system, going forward just like you do today in GSM systems around the world. You may not label it as a cellular system, and it’s much more than that. It has broadband data as well as voice, but it has all of the attributes of a system you would associate with cellular, including full mobility. It’s a very capable technology.

On carriers using voice over IP over WiMAX: Traditional cellular systems today are circuit-based so they really cannot support voice over IP until they move to more of an IP packet-based network. The cellular networks are headed that way, but WiMAX launches from Day 1 with this packet-based flat architecture running IP services. From the get-go it’s designed to support all of these services that are IP friendly, including voice over IP. As far as making it a core service, I couldn’t say. I’m not that intimate with the details of how much our customers want to emphasize each individual service. But the vast majority of them are testing voice over IP. All of them plan to offer voice over IP. I just don’t know if they expect to make it a primary service or just a secondary service.

On whether WiMAX will be used for fixed broadband or true mobility: All of these contracts will eventually go mobile. It’s just a matter of how you deploy the network. In other words, do you deploy in a particular neighborhood and, as you expand your coverage, you eventually offer a mobile service? Or do you build an entire region with 1000 cell sites immediately and, therefore, now you’re offering full mobility? It’s a matter of your ability to fund the capital buildout of these systems. All of the network operators are interested in hand-held devices, consumer devices, laptop PCs that have the ability to be mobile.

On Motorola’s cPE and hand-held device strategy: We’ve shipped [customer premises equipment] already to Wateen, and they have banks that are using the system. That was our first product, but we’ll have a whole series of products coming out this summer and later in the year. The one that Wateen has is an outdoor unit, and we’ll be shipping indoor units to them later this summer. Devices are not something we’ve announced. We have announced the development of ASICS. We're developing our own chips for WiMAX technology; those chips are well under way. The design of the ASIC is internal to Motorola, and we’re using external foundries since we’re no longer in the chip manufacturing business.

We do want to control our destiny as far as developing particular features and making sure we have low current drain—those kinds of things. We do a lot of chip development ourselves; maybe it’s not so obvious to everyone because we don’t announce every chip we’re developing. It’s pretty standard for Motorola to do the chip development, and we have the option to use Freescale and other companies to actually manufacture the chips.

On participation in the WiMAX Forum’s Plugfest: These plugfests are very important to guarantee the interoperability of products from different vendors. That’s one of the draws of WiMAX. It’s a standard where equipment from multiple manufactures can work together. Up to the point the WiMAX standard was formed, all broadband wireless solutions were pretty much proprietary. Now we have a standard that will really allow the technology to grow much faster than it has done in the past. As cellular today is a standard, it has enjoyed tremendous growth. We expect the same thing to happen with WiMAX.

On Motorola’s integration of NextNet, purchased from Clearwire last year: We are actively launching a PCMIA card using the Expedience technology. That technology was originally developed for Clearwire, but it’s actually deployed in quite a few countries around the world. We’re developing additional cost reductions for customers. There will be a transition to WiMAX for those customers that want to transition that way. We’re developing products that will help with that transition. In other words, we can ship a WiMAX-capable base station, but we’ll put the Expedience software in the base station and then we’ll do a migration path. We’ll do something similar for the CPE. That capability will be launched later this year for those customers like Clearwire that have an install base that want to convert over to WiMAX technology. The current NextNet base station is only capable of Expedience technology. For those companies that want to stay with that technology, that’s fine—we’ll continue to support it—but for those customers that want to migrate over to WiMAX they need to have WiMAX-capable base stations.

On what we can expect from Motorola for the remainder of the year: You can expect more product announcements. I would expect you’ll see more contracts being approved. You’ll see announcements of systems being formally launched. Lots of momentum is what you’ll see in 2007.