Slashdot Mirror

Comcast, Verizon, ATT... all could provide very affordable broadband to small remote communities and individual homes/farms, but as I said C*Os, politicians, and clerics are typically Luddites for profits/perks.

Wave-making technology, economics, social change/innovation is against their personal ethics of greed/avarice...hubris.

Is it 802.16 that might work for US re-motes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.16
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deployed_WiMAX_networks
http://www.wimaxforum.org/technology/downloads/WiMAXNLOSgeneral-versionaug04.pdf

Antenna Towers
http://www.cellularmaps.com/3g_compare.shtml

Telecommunications Multi-Function Platform
http://www.worldskycat.com/markets/skycom.html

When industry/C*Os fails to work, act responsibly, and/or blocks innovation, then governance must demand and do for US!

The problem with Sprint's 4G is that they're using WiMax, while everyone else on the planet will be using LTE.

Assuming you are uninformed... Check out The WiMAX Forum where the front page states: With more than 487 networks deployed in over 141 countries.... You can also check out the WiMAX maps of deployments.

Oh wait, did you hear me right? Yes, DEPLOYMENTS.

Kindly point me to the live deployments of LTE that "everyone else on the planet" will be using while "only" Sprint/Clearwire are using WiMAX?

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.

There are also questions about WiMAX's actual range following a messy Australian rollout, although the vendor there claims the Australian service provider under-provisioned the network."

To provide some context here -- since they used Airspan's equipment, the Australian operator probably deployed the older variant of WiMAX, based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard (called 16d or Fixed WiMAX). The majority of the industry on the other hand has shifted to the newer 802.16e-2005 standard (mobile WiMAX). Fixed WiMAX is essentially a near line of sight technology, not intended for non line of sight or mobile applications.

Mobile WiMAX uses a different physical layer than 16d, and it supports radio features to improve link robustness (such as convolutional turbo coding) and smart antenna technologies (2x2 MIMO to increase capacity and beam forming to increase cell range). In short, you can't gauge the performance of a mobile WiMAX network based on the results from a 16d network. The results I've seen in trials have matched radio propagation estimates fairly well, with the range being roughly what you see you traditional 2G/3G cellular -- 0.5 to 2 miles for non line of sight conditions. I've heard anecdotally of longer ranges of up to 30 miles for line of sight.

The rest of the industry has been fairly pleased with the performance of WiMAX during trials and early market deployments. Consider the number of service providers spending capital dollars to deploy. The WiMAX Forum recently announced there are more than 300 service providers deploying WiMAX in 118 countries worldwide. With Sprint's XOHM network going commercial later this year, we should have a better understanding of the benefits of WiMAX in a few months. The biggest concern I've heard of is the lack of devices today, but hopefully that will be alleviated late this year or early 2009.

Look around and check with your local telecom operators and explain your problem. In some areas power companies also provide broadband access. I ran into this site on the net: Wireless Internet Service which seems to be offering a set of alternatives.

Of course WiMAX (8026.16e) hardware is not really available yet, but it is too early still. There was a plugfest in 9/2006: http://www.wimaxforum.org/news/downloads/Mobile_Wi MAX_Plugfest_WhitePaper.pdf

Sprint announced they would have trial markets in 2007 and deployments in 2008. Not 2006: http://www2.sprint.com/mr/news_dtl.do?id=12960

To "assign and/or transfer to an unaffiliated third party" all of its 2.5 GHZ spectrum currently licensed to BellSouth within one year of the merger closing date.

> That is just plain not true (16e being restricted only)

I may have oversimplified, but let me explain. There are two components to this: the standard as defined by the IEEE, and the profiles as defined by the WiMAX Forum. The former describes the components of the MAC and PHY layers. The latter describes the frequencies, channel bandwidth, number of tones for the OFDM signal, and other parameters. The IEEE standard 802.16e-2005 is not defined for unlicensed spectrum. The profiles defined by the WiMAX Forum are defined by the Mobile Task Group (MTG), and there are several major profiles:

  * 1A: 2300 - 2400 MHz, 8.75 MHz channels (otherwise known as the WiBro profile)
  * 1B: 2300-2400 MHz, 5/10 MHz channels
  * 2A/B/C: 2305-2360 (corresponding to the WCS spectrum in the US), 3.5/5/10 MHz channels
  * 3A: 2496-2690 MHz, 5/10 MHz
  * 4A/B/C: 3300-3400 MHz with 5/7/10 MHz channel bandwidths
  * 5A/B/CL: 3400-3600 MHz with 5/7/10 MHz channels
  * 5A/B/CH: 3600-3800 MHz with 5/7/10 MHz channels

In the U.S. 2.3 and 2.5 GHz are defined as allocated spectrum (similar for Canada, except with the addition of 2.5 GHz). However, for the last one, this does encompass the 3650 MHz license exempt range in the U.S., but because of the way the FCC defined the rules, it isn't clear how existing 3.5 GHz 16e equipment being sold for licensed spectrum in Canada and Europe will be adapted to the frequency.

> And I would not call 16d "old." It's what most people are using.

16d (or to use its formal name IEEE 802.16d-2004) was ratified in 2004, while the 16e (IEEE 802.16e-2005) standard was ratified in 2005. So it is correct to call 16d the older standard. 16e offers many improvements over 16d, including the ability to scale the number of OFDM tones with the channel bandwidth, support for turbo coding to improve the link budget, and significantly improved authentication methods.

> Every company that I've dealt with is a fixed provider and has bought 16d equipment.
> I don't know any mobile providers yet (they are coming, but I don't personally know of any).

You're correct that in terms of deployed WiMAX today, it's all 16d equipment; 16e equipment is still in the market trial stage, happening all over the world. It is expected that starting in 2007, 16e deployments will dwarf 16d deployments, with 16e growing to 10x the size of 16d. Almost all 16d equipment vendors are announcing plans to try to convert their equipment to 16e, since that's the direction the market is going. The major wireless infrastructure vendors who are doing WiMAX (Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, Nortel, Nokia Siemens, etc) are all adopting 16e. This is because the major holders of spectrum in North America are planning on moving to 16e, with the largest being Sprint Nextel. Similarly, note that BellSouth is testing 16e as well. The consensus in the industry is that 16e will be the basis for broadband wireless access, with 16d (as well as the proprietary variants) relegated to niche deployments or going away.

So from where I sit, WiMAX can't be killed, because it's not alive.

WiMAX is simply a term used to denote appliances which have been certified by the WiMAX Forum
From their FAQ:

"The WiMAX Forum is an organization of leading operators and communications component and equipment companies. The WiMAX Forum's charter is to promote and certify the compatibility and interoperability of broadband wireless access equipment that conforms to the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16 and ETSI HiperMAN standards"

They have started testing loads of equipment from various manufacturers, as part of their "certification" process. These products should have been certified before the end of the year. Here are some examples:

Siemens "WayMax"
Alvarion BreezeMax

WiMAX is very much alive.

So from where I sit, WiMAX can't be killed, because it's not alive.

WiMAX is simply a term used to denote appliances which have been certified by the WiMAX Forum
From their FAQ:

"The WiMAX Forum is an organization of leading operators and communications component and equipment companies. The WiMAX Forum's charter is to promote and certify the compatibility and interoperability of broadband wireless access equipment that conforms to the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16 and ETSI HiperMAN standards"

They have started testing loads of equipment from various manufacturers, as part of their "certification" process. These products should have been certified before the end of the year. Here are some examples:

Siemens "WayMax"
Alvarion BreezeMax

WiMAX is very much alive.

• The Wikipedia entry
  
• WiMAX Forum
  
• Wi-Fi Planet
  

There is no equipment *today* that is certified to be WiMax. Everything we're seeing right now is "Pre-WiMax". This is equipment that will probably pass certification, but hasn't yet. The certification lab just started accepting equipment for test a couple months back. The belief is that by the end of the year we'll see some actual certified hardware available. See wimaxforum.org - the official wimax site.

The standards may be fully-baked but it's still possible for different vendors to interpret the language of the standard differently. This happened with Wi-Fi and it may happen with WiMax. One proposed solution is to do a labeling program, like what happened with Wi-Fi. The WiMax Forum wants vendors to submit their products to it for interoperability testing. If they pass, they get to put the official WiMax Forum label on their product packaging. However, not one single product has completed this interoperability testing to date. You see products with a generic "WiMax" label on them, but they just slapped that on there themselves, without any kind of independent verification. There's no guarantee that one brand of hardware is going to work with another.

That 30 mile (48 km?) range sounds awfully nice, but I would guess it's not a figure to be relied on for regular use. The WiMAX forum's home page provides some more realistic range figures:

In a typical cell radius deployment of three to ten kilometers, WiMAX Forum Certified(TM) systems can be expected to deliver capacity of up to 40 Mbps per channel, for fixed and portable access applications. This is enough bandwidth to simultaneously support hundreds of businesses with T-1 speed connectivity and thousands of residences with DSL speed connectivity. Mobile network deployments are expected to provide up to 15 Mbps of capacity within a typical cell radius deployment of up to three kilometers.

It sounds like 3 km (under 2 miles) from a tower is best, with up to 10 km (just over 6 miles) plausible.

Jamie

Wi-Fi is a trademark owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance, and is based on various parts of 802.11. It is a wireless local area network standard.

WiMax is a trademark owned by the WiMax forum, and is 802.16d (Fixed WiMax) and 802.16e (Mobile WiMax) [.16e is not yet ratified by IEEE]. These are wireless metro or wide area network standards (depending on where you feel that difference lies)

The two network technologies will likely co-exist in the future. See this article for how their interaction might work out (in the first few paragraphs) [the article refers to fixed WiMax].

The EU standard is HIPERMAN. The WiMax Forum FAQ says

The IEEE 802.16-2004 (256 OFDM PHY) and ETSI HiperMAN standards share the same PHY and MAC specifications. The WiMAX Forum is active in both standards organizations to ensure that a single global standard for Wireless MAN is adopted.

What this actually means is that the WiMax Forum is working to make sure that WiMax and HIPERMAN products interoperate (not that WiMax eats HIPERMAN or vice versa). US and EU must always make their own standards. It's more fun that way.

Oh yeah, what about WiMAX, right? Sorry, that isn't slated to be available in a truly mobile form until 2006/2007 (search for "Third-generation CPEs").

According to thier about page its 40Mb/s for 3-10km or 15Mb/s for "mobile"/non-directional for 3km.

In a nutshell, it looks like the max transmission is 268 mbps, but I couldn't find a quote for the range. It depends on implementation and frequency, whether it's single-to-multipoint or point-to-point.

Maybe I'm reading this page wrong, but does it say WiMax gets 268mbps each way? Gosh, maybe I will get this book!

Of course, since most broadband connections are still stuck around 2-3mbps, I doubt many hotspots and businesses will upgrade. Who needs a connection that fast to check their email and listen to Eminem?

On a personal level, though, I can't get "268" out of my head. ....268...268... Does anyone know how far the signal goes?

For internet access, WiFi outstrips DSL, Cable, and even Corporate T1s. I'm more concerned about getting honest Broadband (100 Megabits/sec or more) to the home. Cordless internet is fast enough for now.

--Mike--

I am a Ham too, but BPL seems to already be obsolete. As soon as WiMax is available, it will beat out all BPL systems both in quality, cost and speed. See WiMax Home and compare it to the problems with BPL as stated by the ARRL .

It seems to me that it would make a lot more sense if ponied up for a data connection from TowerStream or some other pre-802.16 (WIMAX ) provider, and bridged that over to 802.11. Maybe he could mount the antenna on an industrial strength version of those dorky looking bicycle flags.

I don't know his cell provider, but where I'm from, thats some expensive bandwidth, so $500 a month for T1 connectivity doesn't sound too unreasonable. Be better if there were a Navini provider or someone else that does better with non-fixed signals, but hey, you take what you can get.

Yes, it's cool, but this seems a little over the top:

"WiFi.Bedouin is designed to be functional as well as provocative, expanding the possible meaning and metaphors about access, proximity, wireless and WiFi. This access point is not the web without wires. Instead, it is its own web , an apparatus that forces one to reconsider and question notions of virtuality, materiality, displacement, proximity and community. " (Emphasis theirs.)

I can't imagine it will be long before this gets combined with WiMax, and then none of that "not web without wires" will apply anymore.

The Nextel system supports fixed and mobile users. Radio systems that support mobile users have to be designed differently from those that only support fixed users. Mobility adds radio issues such as variable fading and doppler shift as well as the need to handover between different transmitters at the edge of cells. Fixed radio systems can't to any of this.

WiMax is competing with DSL and cable for broadband to stationary objects.

What does 3G have to do with Wi-Fi?

Google for WiMax. Here's a link to get you started.

From a random article about the WiMax 802.16a standard: "802.16 WirelessMAN (Metropolitan Area Network) fixed wireless broadband, has a range of up to about 30 miles with data transfer speeds of up to 70mbps". Also, "802.16a is considered the next step beyond WiFi because it is optimized for broadband operation, fixed and later mobile".

Go to wimaxforum for technical info.