This past week, WiMAX proponents were bolstered by a couple of announcements: one from AT&T (NYSE:T) and another one from Covad (OTC BB: COVD.OB).  Both companies made their announcements at Web 2.0 Conference that took place in San Francisco last week (Ed. note: Om Malik had a few interesting postings in his blog about the conference).

Ben Charny had an interesting article on the WiMAX announcements on CNET news.  It was not surprising to hear that IXCs such as AT&T or xSPs such as Covad exploring WiMAX as a potential alternative to FTTH/FTTC in offering VoIP and broadband access bundles to consumers.  The end of UNE rules in June has forced IXCs, CLECs and xSPs to make sweeping changes in their strategies and focus on wholesale, enterprise and perhaps some innovation, as weapons to stay competitive against the RBOCs.  Not only that, WiMAX has the promise of cheaper costs ($75 versus $1,500 or more per dwelling).  As mentioned in a few posts here, there are quite a few issues left to be solved for WiMAX, but there is potential for a broadband wireless solution to still emerge as a viable alternative. 

Not only that, but the RBOCs' FTTH exercise will take quite sometime, and within a much shorter time window (i.e. 2-4 years), the prospects of  WiMAX (or even a proprietary broadband wireless scheme) will look a lot brighter.  It might require a bit of creativity, but it is something that could be done.  It will be for instance, interesting to see some electric utility act as a landlord and lease some of its feeder network to act as a backhaul access to a WiMAX network operated by a player such as Covad.  The future will tell whether such partnerships could eventually become a reality.

Note: Mark Goldberg (who authors Occam's Razor, my favorite Euro VC/strategy blog) had a good compilation of WiMAX articles in a previous post in his blog.