Maloney claims credit crunch is good for Wimax

THE CREDIT CRUNCH IS GOOD FOR  WIMAX, Intel VP Sean Maloney told a select MWC panel this morning. "All the conditions are right for Wimax deployment," he said.

What British-born Maloney called "shattering change in market conditions", were simply increasing momentum from governments around the world to accelerate connecting their communities.

"We said 2008 needed to be the year when Wimax went into production after four to five years and that's exactly what happened" said Maloney, claiming the credit crunch was more of a catalyst for Wimax than an impediment.

Maloney reminded the audience governments were currently investing $3.5 trillion in economic reconstruction and rhetorically asked "what better for reconstruction is there than to build the infrastructure of the next 10 years, rather than just reconstructing the old infrastructure?"

Maloney said he was seeing a growing consensus amongst governments when it came to Wimax, adding. "That is why we made Wimax. We made Wimax to be a flat IP network to solve the digital divide and give high speed wireless."

Enthusiastically, Maloney called on communities to rise to the challenge, saying "go and deploy these networks, drive down the cost, increase the availability of all kinds of devices, interop and all that."

"LTE is just a distraction", he said playing down what he saw as a press overfocus on a head-to-head competition between the two technologies

Maloney said he thought it "gratuitous" Intel had gotten the network done over the past year and that he believed there was now "an enormous opportunity in the next 12-18 months." µ