Dateline: Madrid

Yankee Group’s focus on disruptive connectivity technologies has led us to regular research on WiMAX, the so-called fourth-generation of mobile network architectures. The WiMAX Forum is a non-profit association formed to complete the standard, assure interoperability, and hammer out other market issues to support its adoption. Today I’m snacking on tapas in Madrid at one of the Forum’s quarterly week-long meetings around the world to get a sense of the state of play.

I worked on a communications standards body 20 years ago. It hasn’t changed much: the same geeky, acronym-rich environment bogged down a bit by the democratic process, but powered by the shared passion to create something useful. It might not mean an end to world hunger in our time, but getting mobile broadband to emerging countries is a very worthy endeavor in my book. Communication means economic and political empowerment.

It’s not going to be easy, though. The challenges are less with the technology which can be bent to do pretty much whatever we want and more about the business models in place today and the potential threat from truly seamless broadband. I was fascinated by one discussion between two teams, one charged with designing global roaming support, and the other conceiving the future applications of the architecture. When a network provider in one region has licensed content for subscribers who roam into another network with a competing arrangement, or none at all, is the content blocked? Who pays who and how much?

Content owners must think globally about distribution deals now; political boundaries will be almost impossible to maintain in the Anywhere Network.