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Sorry to start off with such a corporate cliché as this, but there are a couple of “take aways” that we can, uh, take away from the existence of a WiMAX pavilion at this year's Supercomm show. The first is that the companies now supporting the young WiMAX ecosystem will always be able to say that they were part of the very first WiMAX exhibit at Supercomm. The other is that the companies now supporting the young WiMAX ecosystem believe that the day when WiMAX becomes a commercial reality is nearly upon us, and they are doing everything the can to create a healthy market.

Yet, just as good intentions offer no guarantees of victory in life nor in horribly degrading reality TV shows, neither do they guarantee commercial success. WiMAX has been heavily touted for at least two years now as the next big thing in broadband. It has a lot going for it, with the energy of hundreds of companies in the WiMAX Forum and a lot of network equipment choices, not to mention the commitment of companies such as Intel, Fujitsu and others developing chipsets for the subscriber equipment that will encourage broad market acceptance. And service providers are definitely interested, whether it's through membership in the WiMAX Forum — one of the only standards-focused trade groups we can think of that has more service provider members than vendor members — or through early commitments to WiMAX trials and services.

However, one of the things WiMAX doesn't have going for it is that it's not completely clear where it fits in the complex realm of broadband access technologies. Call it an alternative to existing broadband technologies if you will, but “alternative” is what you call something when you don't really think it can be replacement.

Whether telco, cable TV company or mobile carrier, many service providers already have made their broadband choices, and for those who have, WiMAX could be one more tool in the shed. That's nice, but if that shed is anything like the shed in my parents' backyard in semi-suburban northern Illinois (We tried to call it “upstate,” but it wouldn't stick), it will house a bunch of tools that never get used.

Service providers don't deploy innovative technologies for the sake of themselves, which is a lesson the DSL crowd learned long ago. That's not to say WiMAX doesn't have its applications or its market targets straight. But WiMAX's best chance for moving beyond niche success may lie in the willingness of carriers to leave behind their traditional obsessions over getting the most out of their legacy access infrastructures.

That's where IMS comes in. Its architectural concepts will disconnect network mediums from applications in such a way that both areas will benefit from greater efficiency and flexibility of purpose. WiMAX, in the context of IMS, will become just another avenue on which carriers create, operate, manage and bill for broadband services. There was no such common architecture supporting DSL, ISDN, fiber, hybrid fiber-coax and every other technology that lived at the inception of the broadband era. It makes all the difference that there is now. It's why carriers seem so prepared to turn to IMS, and why WiMAX realizing its greatest potential may depend on a concurrent evolution to IMS architectures. IMS will create a broadband access world defined by easy choices — because none of the old hard choices will have to be made.