Why WiMAX? AT&T's reasons...

Behzad Nadji is a busy man. Vice President of AT&T Labs Research, Vice President of AT&T Network, OSS and IT Architecture. I had the opportunity to spend an hour with Behzad to hear about the issues his group is addressing.

Here is the simple math for why AT&T will be an enormous customers for WiMAX - $10 billion in annual local access fees paid to the local exchange carriers... 75% of this amount spent on connecting to customers that are using less that 5 T1s and are less than 3 miles from an AT&T central office. That is $7.5 billion PER YEAR that AT&T can spend to replace the local loop.

Another intersting tidbit -- 1.4 petabytes of data flow over AT&T's data network every day. The largest IP network in the world.