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I was at CTIA this year looking for Wimax enabled devices and release schedules, here are some relevant links from people I saw on the show floor:

http://www.runcom.com/sitefiles/1/3310/19046.asp

Go to the part about Wimax Phones. There are also Wimax video IP phones and wimax based surveillance systems shown there, see a product announcement here from Feb.

https://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/3042555

I don't see details on their site, but the handset I have a flyer for was called the Sting, and was dual mode Wimax/GSM.

Also saw one called the wiofone: http://www.wimax.com/commentary/blog/blog-2008/wimax-blog-wimax-desktop-phone

Placeholder website here: http://wioline.com/

Samsung was also present displaying a number of devices with embedded Wimax chipsets in them, intended to use VoIP as part of the connectivity, such as the PDA (SCH-M830 and M8200), an UMPC or 2 (all of which were Windows based devices), and some standard laptops with wimax chipsets in them.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem still, since the devices will become more common when there's more coverage, more markets, and more possible subscribers, but people will fund the growth of the network when there are devices available which use it. It seems pretty obvious from investments that Intel/Motorola et al are both trying hard to lock in a future where many devices will have embedded wimax chipsets simply included as bluetooth and wifi chipsets are today. And not just laptops, but cars, washing machines, refrigerators, anything that would benefit from network access.

I'm not as sure about airwaves being viable competition for fiber.

It could be for local access in high density areas such as cities. WiMax is growing by leaps and bounds in Asia. Spending is high in both China and India, by 2013 India may be the biggest WiMax market in Asia. If they can do it I see no reason the US can't, as long as the incumbents are kept out of the way. But of course they'll fight it tooth and nail if they can't have a piece of it. Now I'll admit fiber can provide more bandwidth but it's possible to get as fast a broadband as many people get now from cable and DSL.

Falcon

Just to clarify - OFDM is the modulation method used to convery data. Modulation methodology doesnt really tell you much about bandwidth and data rate, since a communication channel design can trade these properties off in an interactive manner when the design standard is defined.

The good news is that WiMax is designed to do data over long distance (measured in Km's) rather than the the duct tape installations of WiFi, which was never supposed to be used for distance data communication. Some of the crazy WiFi installations that are out there are 5 star silly, trying to do things that WiFi systems were never designed to do.

Some useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wimax
http://www.wimaxforum.org/
http://www.wimax.com/
http://www.networkworld.com/topics/wimax.html

If you want to get into the nitty gritty of the details, the IEEE has the 802.16 standards for all the details as well.
The good news is that this time around it actualy seems to be happening. It's out there in a big way (read some of the deployments in the above links) but not widespread yet.

The largest private company in India (Reliance) has soft-launched WiMax for consumers in some parts of Bangalore... and a quick search on Google reveals users are not very happy. SIFY, Aircel and VSNL already offer WiMax for corporate customers in some parts of the country..
More here

Several items are coming to a head in the laptop market that will drastically reduce power usage.

1) SSD Hard Drive. The hard drive is one of the biggest power consumers in the laptop today, by changing to an SSD, this can be drastically reduced. Yes, they are more expensive and they are smaller capacity than a HD, but in addition to being less power hungry, they are also much faster, smaller, and lighter.

2) Digital Paper Displays. The back lighting required by current LCDs is very expensive to run power consumption wise. They also require power 100% of the time to maintain the image itself even though this is much less than the back light power requirements. As the digital paper displays become more commercialized, we will see them start to take over the laptop market. Digital paper does not use back lighting and does not require power to maintain the image, only to change the image. Thus drastically reducing the amount of power required for the display.

3) Wireless network adapter. There are several changes coming in the Wireless world in the near future that will reduce the power requirements of wireless networking. As 802.11n moves from draft to production standards and the equipment become inter operable, we will see more usage of the N mode networking which will allow for most network cards to run at lower power for the same connectivity we see today. WiMax and other similar technologies will also bring lower power consumption for wireless networking.

4) Sub 40nm chips. As we shrink circuits smaller and smaller, we are finding that they, in general, require less power to operate. In addition, new materials, such as the new High-k materials, are required to allow circuits to operate correctly at this smaller scale and these new materials are also introducing power savings. As RAM, CPU, and main chipset chips are moved to the smaller die size we will find they use less and less power.

5) Non-Volatile MRAM. Another power consumer is main memory. Even if the system is idle, RAM requires power just to maintain the data stored in it. New technologies are just coming to fruition that will create RAM that does not require power constantly but will be just as fast as current RAM offerings and not have the life span problems that Flash RAM has.

Combine all of these changes with the fact that we may see Li-Ion batteries that have 3-5 times the capacity of today's Li-Ion batteries on a size to size or weight to weight ratio, I expect that over the next 5 years we will see personal electronic devices shrink to down to the point where they are practically non-existent

WiMAX can use both licensed spectrum (e.g. Sprint, Clearwire) and unlicensed spectrum - the latter is more prone to interference of course, and is limited in the power you can use, so it's less useful for non-line-of-sight (NLOS) coverage (depending on how close you are to the WiMAX base station). See http://www.wimax.com/education/faq/faq48.

I'd expect the commercial WiMAX services to use licensed spectrum, but that doesn't stop someone setting up their own WiMAX network if they can find suitable hardware supporting spectrum that is unlicensed in their country.

I tend to agree with most what you say but especially with the IG Farben of telecommunications you downplay corporate greed. Did you know that Deutsche Telekom charges their DSL subscribers extra when they want to use their own email rather than the @t-online.de address they are automatically assigned? Yes! Unless you pay them extra, no matter what sender address you wish to use, mail going through their smtp server gets it sender address substituted with your @tonline.de address. With that kind of thinking it will only be a matter of time until they block all outgoing traffic on port tcp/25 (smtp) and charge you twice as much not to fiddle with your sender address.

The most obvious solution to the last mile bottleneck of course is IEEE 802.16 "WiMax". a high-bandwidth wireless network designed especially with getting through on the last mile in mind. Besides being a threat to the last mile cash cow it also competes with telco high-bandwidth wireless services such as UMTS phone and data.

By there nature, there is nothing minimally intrusive about location based phone services...someone always knows where you are. As far as google going WiMax...someone has to compete with Guys Like This