TORONTO (WiMAX Day) by Joachim Bamrud. Based on the lesson from third generation wireless telecom deployment, Nortel has moved slower with WiMAX in an effort to guarantee success.

“When we launched 3G we didn’t pay enough attention to get the devices on time,” Bruce Gustafson, director of WiMAX marketing at Nortel, reports. “When they came, they were expensive and had a short battery life. So we are spending a lot of time and attention to develop the WiMAX ecosystem to make sure that WiMAX chip sets are available. That whole ecosystem play is the key to the success of 4G over 3G.”

Nortel is now going into trials with laptop card capabilities and full WiMAX MIMO implementation, he says. He expects WiMAX devices like handhelds and PDAs to come in the second half of 2007 and WiMAX embedded laptops in 2008.

“There’s going to be quite a range of devices over next two years,” Gustafson says.

He remains bullish on WiMAX because it represents the first step in 4G technologies that will enable consumers to get the content they want on their devices. Part of the limited success of 3G was the lack of sufficient network capability to provide the speed and quality consumers wanted, he points out.

“We look at consumers. They have ten times as many devices and ten times more appetite than before and if I could do it at a lower cost, we would have a tremendous disruption in the telecom space,” Gustafson says. “WiMAX does deliver that improvement in performance and costs to support all those devices. WiMAX is the first kick at that, it offers those economies. That’s why we are excited.”

One of the key applications that will benefit from WiMAX is entertainment, especially gaming. With 3G networks now, gaming is not very interesting. “You are forced to play against a machine and not a live opponent…because of the limitation of the current networks,” he says.

In terms of geographical markets, Gustafson believes North America and Asia will lead the way. “Asia has a set of cultures that are very mobile, where they have taken to cell phones and data services in a tremendous way,” he says. “There’s significant potential there for the richer services WiMAX can offer.”

Countries such as China, India and Russia, with their underdeveloped infrastructure and large populations, also represent strong potential for WiMAX, Gustafson adds.

“Europe is probably lagging behind a bit,” he says. “The cell infrastructure is well built out, they have 3G which offers them constraints on availability of spectrum. They are a year or two behind North America and Asia in picking up WiMAX and driving it forward.”