M-WAG: Mobile World Congress campaign
During Mobile World Congress, Hotwire introduced M-WAG’s (The Mobile WiMAX Acceleration Group) rebrand to the media and analyst community and announced its plans for the UK’s first ever mobile WiMAX trials. M-WAG is a group of ten member companies that together form the complete supply chain to deliver a mobile WiMAX service. Launched by Hotwire in July by founding members Nortel, Urban Wimax and Macropolitan, the group has gained considerable weight, and is now promoting the end-user benefits of mobile WiMAX technology via a series of showcases.The first of these showcases is planned for April and will take place in Maidstone. This showcase will make M-WAG the first ever group to deliver a UK mobile WiMAX pilot network over 2.5GHz. The network will cover 7.5 square kilometres from the centre of Maidstone, which is home to over 75,000 people and 4,500 businesses. Once the network goes live, M-WAG will begin a range of trials encompassing services such as mobile VoIP, real-time high-quality video streaming and live broadcast. In addition, M-WAG will also be trialling WiFi to WiMAX handover and advanced charging systems to support any services that may be launched commercially.
Maidstone Borough Council will be the first to trial this service. The council is excited about being able to deliver robust, resilient and secure data transmission at a much lower cost than other mobile alternatives and feels residents will not only benefit indirectly through improved, lower cost services, but those within the network perimeter will also be able to benefit directly through using mobile
WiMAX at home or for business. WiMAX and LTE were hot topics at this year’s Mobile World Congress both for companies such as Motorola and Alcatel-Lucent, and analysts, many of whom stating 2008 will be the year of WiMAX. In addition, Arun Sarin of Vodafone, made a call to the industry to merge WiMAX & LTE standards. M-WAG’s announcement generated significant interest during the show with over twenty pieces of coverage secured by Hotwire in national, telecoms and trade media. Following the show M-WAG made front page news in IT Week and dominated a mobile WiMAX report shortly after.
