Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) - which represents primarily major carriers operating WiFi hotspots - and the WiMAX Spectrum Owners Alliance (WiSOA) are collaborating "to advance global roaming for WiMAX and inter-standard roaming between WiMAX and WiFi" as a first step towards an eventual merger.
Under the terms of an agreement between the two, WiSOA will effectively merge all of its roaming activities into WBA, and will work towards the eventual merger of its membership base into WBA. The membership of WiSOA includes Unwired (Australia), NextWave (USA), Liberty Global (USA), YTL (Malaysia), Telecom New Zealand, UK Broadband and Irish Broadband. The much larger
WBA was formed in 2003 to develop a common commercial and technical framework for wireless broadband technologies and by October 2006 had grown to 26 network operators across Asia Pacific, Americas and Europe.
Executive committee members include Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile, Orange France, BT, KT, Swisscom and Tata Communications and clearinghouse providers such as MACH, Syniverse and VeriSign.
The WBA has developed the Wireless Roaming Intermediary eXchange (WRIX), a set of modular specifications and standards for radius interconnection, data & financial clearing that is now used extensively to support commercial WiFi roaming amongst WBA members.
According to WiSOA spokesman, and Unwired founder, Steve Cosser: "The ability to use WBA WRIX provides both WiFi and WiMAX operators with instant access to a commercially and technically proven roaming capability along with an ecosystem of interconnect and clearinghouse providers. 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."
Prateek Pashine, chairman of WBA, said: "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."
Pashine added that an industry collaboration project to support requirements for WiMAX roaming and inter-standard roaming between WiMAX and WiFi had already been commissioned by WBA, and the initial results were expected to be available for operators by second half of 2008.
David Bass
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