WiMAX

[Scott A. Kampas]

WiMAX, a technology that enables high-speed Internet access on mobile devices that is much faster than current cellular service, took its next step toward becoming a reality.

Phone carrier Sprint Nextel and wireless provider Clearwire today agreed to build the first nationwide mobile broadband network using WiMAX technology, a move that will soup up Web access on mobile devices should the network come to fruition in 2008 as expected.

WiMAX, which operates more than five times faster than today's wireless networks, can allow workers to conduct live video conferences from remote locations, or let consumers play whole movies via laptops, mobile phones and other handheld devices.

The two companies expect to roll out WiMAX for 100 million people by the end of 2008.

http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3689826

[Tarmo Tanilsoo]

I am using WiMAX from a stationary device. It spreaded to my area last year and I got connected to the Internet through this - before that I had only GPRS connection in my phone as my home farm did not have any Internet coverage before. I say it is rather good, back in winter it had some very slow days with 7 kbit/s speed instead of 256 kbit/s (that's my data packet) or so, but it appears to be fixed. Only time Internet goes down is when I need to reboot the networking device so the network itself seems to work fine. Be prepared that some operators might want to impose some bandwidth limits, for example I have 10 GB limit.

[Skip Talbot]

Is this going to be an additional metro-area only broadband network like the 3G cellular network, or the beginning of highly coveted, long awaited nationwide wireless broadband?

[Tarmo Tanilsoo]

Is this going to be an additional metro-area only broadband network like the 3G cellular network, or the beginning of highly coveted, long awaited nationwide wireless broadband?

Well, the tower's range here is about 15 miles. I am sure it is awaited in my neck of the woods. I am not sure about yours, because of the size of your country.

[beaudodson]

From what I heard on the news thsi will not include rural areas.

[Tarmo Tanilsoo]

From what I heard on the news thsi will not include rural areas.

That's sad. Here in Estonia WiMAX is actually used to cover rural areas... Your cities must be then that large that their radius is 20 km...

[Gordon Spencer]

Wimax is not feasible at this time in Rural areas as they are just not getting the coverage from the towers they anticipated. At best towers are geting a signal reach of about 5 miles . Which would mean just too many towers at $250,000 to $750,000 a piece in rural areas. Learn to love EVDO till they can perfect this technology more so signals carry further,
From what I heard on the news thsi will not include rural areas.

[Tarmo Tanilsoo]

What kind of towers are you then using? IEEE 802.16e-2005? Here in Estonia, there is 3 mile radius for non line of sight and 10 miles for line of sight, probably even more if you use a stronger antenna. I am approximately 6 miles from my nearest WiMAX tower.

[rdale]

Tarmo - the speeds you are mentioning are much slower than what WiMAX is proposing, so I'd guess comparisons between the two systems are probably not needed since this is completely different.

[Tarmo Tanilsoo]

What kind of speeds do you expect? The fastest data plan in my ISP(what uses WiMAX 802.16-2004 network) has 2 mbit/s, but our family has chosen the slowest, 256 kbit/s plan