LONDON (WiMAX Day). The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) and the WiMAX Spectrum Owners Alliance (WiSOA) have announced that the two groups will focus their combined efforts to advance global roaming for WiMAX and inter-standard roaming between WiMAX and WiFi.

Under the terms of the agreement, WiSOA will effectively merge all of its roaming activities into WBA, and in addition, WiSOA will work towards the eventual merger of its membership base into WBA. The membership of WiSOA includes companies such as Unwired (Australia), NextWave (USA), Liberty Global (USA), YTL (Malaysia), Telecom New Zealand, UK Broadband and Irish Broadband.

According to Prateek Pashine, Chairman of WBA, “The agreement between WiSOA with WBA brings the rich experience of the participant operators on WiMAX which would help accelerate the development and deployment of commercial roaming for WiMAX operators as well as inter-standard roaming between WiMAX and WiFi.” This is in line with WBA’s vision to provide customers with seamless internet access and services across networks and geographies, just as the customers would use in their home networks.

WBA was formed in 2003 to develop a common commercial and technical framework for wireless broadband technologies. Since then, the WBA developed the Wireless Roaming Intermediary eXchange (WRIX), a set of modular specifications and standards for Radius Interconnection, Data & Financial Clearing.

The WRIX specification is now used extensively to support commercial WiFi roaming amongst WBA members. The WBA members include leading wireless broadband network operators such as Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile, Orange France, BT, KT, Swisscom and Tata Communications and clearinghouse providers such as MACH, Syniverse and Verisign.

Amongst these networks are more than 85,000 WiFi hotspots worldwide and a pool of more than 230 million subscribers across Europe, Asia Pacific and Americas.

“The ability to use WBA WRIX provides both WiFi and WiMAX operators instant access to a commercially and technically proven roaming capability along with an ecosystem of interconnect and clearinghouse providers” said Steve Cosser of WiSOA.

He further added that “As WBA members have a global WiFi footprint and some are evaluating WiMAX, working together allows all of us to swiftly upgrade the WBA WRIX to support WiMAX roaming as well as inter-roaming between WiFi and WiMAX.”

Pashine said that an industry collaboration project to support requirements for WiMAX roaming and inter-standard roaming between WiMAX and WiFi has already been commissioned by WBA, and the initial results are expected to be available for operators by second half of 2008.