Industry groups combine to boost WiMAX roaming
29 April 2008
Industry groups combine to boost WiMAX roaming
Two industry associations, the WiMAX Spectrum Owners Alliance (WiSOA) and the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) are pooling their resources to develop global roaming for WiMAX, as well as inter-standard roaming between WiMAX and wifi.
The new working arrangement between the two groups will see the WiSOA conduct its roaming activities through the WBA, which will lead eventually to the merger of WiSOA's membership base with that of the WBA.
The WiSOA membership contains a number of WiMAX operators, including Cosmoline (Greece), Irish Broadband, Max Telecom (Bulgaria), UK Broadband, Unwired (Austria), WiMAX Telecom (Austria, Slovakia and Croatia) and Bizsurf (Malaysia).
WBA, founded in 2003, has developed the Wireless Roaming Intermediary eXchange (WRIX), which is primarily focused on supporting roaming, from both a commercial and technical point of view, between wifi operators. WBA members include BT, Korea Telecom, T-Mobile, Orange France, Swisscom and Tata Communications. Syniverse and Verisign, clearinghouse vendors, are also WBA members.
By combining the roaming efforts of WiSOA with the WBA, the plan is to upgrade the WBA WRIX so it can support WiMAX, although no timescale for that upgrade has yet been disclosed. WBA does say, however, it has already commissioned a project to establish what the requirements for WiMAX roaming and inter-standard roaming between WiMAX and wifi would be. The initial results are expected to be available for operators by the second half of 2008.
The WiMAX Forum, too, is ramping up its roaming efforts. The establishing of technical and commercial standards for roaming, says the WiMAX Forum, is a priority for 2008 and 2009.
A WiMAX Forum Working Group has already established a roaming framework in three parts: roaming guidelines to ensure that operators and vendors are implementing WiMAX Forum frequency profiles, channel band configurations, authentication methods and devices; legal templates for bilateral roaming agreements between operators; and roaming exchange specifications, defining how operators exchange information to track usage, create invoices, and execute financial settlements.
Speaking to telecoms.com earlier this year, John Dubois, director of the WiMAX Forum's Global Roaming Working Group, said that he expected all three parts of the roaming framework to be completed and published by mid-2008.
It is believed that the Working Group on roaming will leverage the WRIX specification.
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