Multiple devices per account on WiMAX + also wholesale options

I saw an interesting announcement this morning from Bridgewater Systems, about a solution to enable WiMAX operators to control the number of active connections per user/device. While it's being pitched as a sort of fraud-management tool, it highlights something pretty important:

WiMAX services will enable multiple devices per subscription

This isn't news as such - many market participants like Sprint have been saying this was likely for some time. But it's something that the existing cellular providers and architecture are pretty bad at. Yes, you can get family plans and corporate group accounts. Yes, discounts are available where you get both phone and 3G dongle from the same provider, linked at "customer account" level. 

But with very few exceptions, operators don't offer the option for a single subscription (ie "phone number") to support multiple devices. A few operators provide 2+ SIMs, but there's typically a clunky procedure for the user to denote which device is "active" at a given time.

Increasingly, I find myself using two or three screens simultaneously - making a phone call while using my laptop, using handheld device for email while doing something else on my PC, and so on. There's no reason why I should need multiple mobile accounts, any more than I do running two PCs over a single ADSL subscription. Why shouldn't I have two, three or more devices sharing my mobile broadband, as long as my aggregate traffic is less than the monthly cap?

WiMAX has an inherent advantage here in not needing SIM cards, in my view.

Interestingly, Bridgewater also has a wholesale solution for WiMAX providers - another angle in which I'm expecting some differentiation from cellular networks. My view is that there will be a broader selection of partner/wholesale business models in WiMAX, compared with the fairly monochrome choice of MVNOs on cellular. I'm expecting to see regional wholesale networks (eg for local councils), or ones based on specific QoS metrics (eg low-latency gaming MVNO vs secure enterprise MVNO vs. streaming-optimised MVNO). 

To some extent, WiMAX operators will be driven to these niches because they've pretty much relinquished the PC-connectivity market to HSPA/EVDO dongles in the near term. But it also reflects the likely open-minded nature of new WiMAX entrants to try innovative Telco 2.0 business models.