Mobile WiMAX Providers Must Reach Out to YouTube Generation

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Mobile WiMAX Providers Must Reach Out to YouTube Generation

6:00 am on December 31, 2007 | Category: Web Services, Wireless Technology, Internet, Wireless, WiMAX

Mobile WiMAX, a much-anticipated long-range networking technology, could attract 80 million subscribers over the next six years, but only if it successfully hooks the “YouTube generation,” according to a study released by Juniper Research earlier this month.

Juniper analysts expect Mobile WiMAX to take off globally by 2012, and reach a global subscriber base of 80 million sometime in 2013. WiMAX will still be dwarfed by HSDPA, a 3G data standard set to dominate the mobile broadband market in the years to come, but will have made impressive inroads for such a new technology.

“Mobile WiMax will represent a single digit proportion of the global mobile broadband base by 2013,” said Juniper analyst, Howard Wilcox, in a statement. “This will be a tremendous achievement for this new technology platform which has recently been boosted by the ITU’s [International Telecommunications Union’s] endorsement of it as an IMT2000 specification.”

Wilcox said that he expects 18 to 35-year-olds to be a key demographic for Mobile WiMAX providers in the years to come, meaning that companies would be wise to develop offerings for future customers who may be teenagers today.

“What they’re going to have to do is think about the things that make the sort of sticky services that demographic likes the most,” Wilcox explained. “That could include social networking, it could include YouTube-type services, it could include music MP3-based services, maybe the ability to download direct to an MP3 player rather than via a PC. They’re going to have to construct packages which appeal and provide differentiation, either through new advanced features and capabilities or from a price perspective that’ll win over the key target age group.”

Juniper Research predicts annual Mobile WiMAX revenues of more than $23 billion by 2013, with the United States, Japan, and South Korea forming the largest markets for the technology.