The whole point of WiMax was for carriers not to need as massive a fiber build out. It appears to have arrived too late for those kind of ambitions because telco’s and cable operators are already in the middle of the massive fiber build out that will be needed for next generation, high bandwidth applications. Time Warner had to upgrade 60% of the head ends and cabling around here before they could gauruntee the QOS they needed to meet Sprint’s minimum requirements. This cost them tens of millions of dollars. The thing WiMax has on fiber is cost. Imagine how much it cost time warner to wire up all of those houses, keep the coax maintained, service calls because of cable problems, etc… trust me its alot. By beginning with a high bandwidth wireless architecture you can provide the same services at a fraction of the costs. I can’t even quantify how much it costs to build and maintain a cable network, but I know a guy that can and the answer is tens of millions per year. What WiMax allows us to do is directly compete for the same market with a much smaller initial investment. My plan is incomplete because I have spent all of my time on the viatalk project but here is how things can work.
Data -this is easy WiMax CPE works in a similar manner to cable modems, the spec was built on the DOCSIS spec which is basically MAC authentication with provisions for encryption, and different levels of service provisioning (one guy can get 1 MB down, and another 3MB for instance)
Voice -also relatively easy, we can simply stick a pap2 on one of the ethernet ports and QOS sip traffic to the highest priority, then we set the accounts up as we normally do
IPTV -this is a little newer, there exists (1)CPE, designed (2)for this. To get the content, you set up a reseller account with the national programming service, get a C band satellite (these toss you mpeg2 video) NPS is something like 10 cents per channel per customer, and it goes down the more customers you get. That is exactly what cable companies do which is why if you drive pas a headend you see a bunch off satellites pointed to different transponders.
New Services – What will really set a provider apart is new services that don’t yet exist.