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Intel Pushes 802.16a Wireless MAN Standard
An anonymous reader writes "The 802.16a standard, approved in January of this year, is a wireless metropolitan area network technology that will connect 802.11 hot spots to the Internet and provide a wireless extension to cable and DSL for last mile broadband access. It provides up to 50-kilometers of range and allows users to get broadband connectivity without needing a direct line of sight with the base station. The wireless broadband technology also provides shared data rates up to 70-Mbit/s."
I don't think I want to share 70-Mbit/s with everyone using the service within a 50 kilometer range.
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
To clarify,
And every one of them has got to have backhaul
WiMAX isn't expected to be what you use to hit the 'hotspots' with your notebook. It is expected to feed the hotspots... it *is* the backhaul. Naturally it must have it's own, land-based backhaul, but that's no sweat for guys who'll be rolling this out.
The idea of 'free' zones will largely pass when the people with the money to make wireless internet work finally get the tech and the business model worked out. Yes, I said *business*. Sure, there will be people, organizations and towns who'll foot the bill for small hotspots, but to make it work, to make it ubiquitous such that you *expect* it to work, will be require a commercial model. 802.16a is the first major technological step toward this model's feasibility.
When I thought about this for a second...
It seems to me that this is the backend for the 802.11b and/or 802.11g wireless hotspots. Try this scenario..
Say I own a lot of starbucks (if they allow franchising, but this is an example so it doesn't matter).
I have a big fat oc3 sitting in downtown LA ready to serve bandwith to a lot of starbucks in LA. It would be MUCH more economical to pay for just one oc3 rather then a bunch of t1's or even cable modems for EACH starbucks. Using this technology, you pay once for the hardware and can send the bandwith from your oc3 over to each and every starbucks you want to and siphon it through the 802.11x clients without having to have the cable/phone companies come in and install land lines in each location.
Also, say that it was decided that you needed more bandwith for your coffee shops. Welp, you just add more bandwith at the home site (assuming each starbucks doesn't NEED 70mbits or whatever the new standard allows), and you now have more bandwith for all your starbucks shops...i think it's a great idea and is extremely expandable.
-gabe
802.11[b,a,g] is WiFi, this is 802.16a. (Note 802.3 is Ethernet, but this isn't Ethernet either). Granted, there's a provision in the spec for linking 802.11 WAN's, but the much more interesting part of the spec is the MAN stuff, with 20km links. The IEEE usually gets these things right, so I wouldn't worry about Mr. Cooper's concerns.
I need this - the only low-latency broadband I can get at my house (in a lovely pastoral setting 7.2 miles from the CO my line is served from, but of course not the closest) runs $850 install plus $90/mo. SWMBO frowns upon such things, so let's hear it for standards!. Remember what Proxim radios cost before 802.11b?
I'm actually more concerned about press articles that were flying around today talking about how Intel was about to revolutionize wireless communications. Yay, they sponsored an industry group already promoting an IEEE spec, but it seems more of a case of "why actually do the work when you can just take credit for it?"
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You know, I've been hearing this exact verbiage for four years now, and I don't believe it any more. When I worked at Metricom, Ricochet was the product that was going to be 'killed' by 3G. Luckily for 3G, Metricom's brain-dead, overspendy management and ridiculous pricing model killed the company instead. Curiously, the arrangement Intel seems to be proposing here is strikingly similar to the dual-band microcellular architecture Ricochet used/uses. Microcellular architecture has some unique strengths, as evidenced by the fact that Ricochet was the ONLY way to get data to ground zero in the days immediately following the WTC attacks.
Now the previous poster is saying this uplink and backhaul arrangement will be obviated by 3G. You know what? Show me. Then I'll believe it. Until then, I don't think 3G will ever solve anything for anyone.
3G sounds like great technology. But it isn't shipping, and there are LOTS of caveats. have you ever seen a technology that worked out of the box? 3G is still "months" away, and it probably won't work as advertised when it does ship, if ever. Perhaps 3G should be renamed "Duke Nukem Forever Wireless".
I'm tired of hearing "wait until 3G". Hell, I'm tired of waiting.
Now thats just silly. Correct arithmetic does not make correct conclusion. Oh wait, I just checked in preview, your arithmetic is wrong. PI*r*r... 3.141596*50*50 = 7853sqkm... ~9kbps/sqkm. Maybe you used PI*PI*r*r? Anyway, to continue...
Just like cellular phone cell size, you tailor the coverage area to match the number of subscribers. In an urban area you use small cells, as small as a block or 4, in rural areas crank it up and cover a whole county. (I'm from Missouri, ours fit. Nevadans and Austrailians not so.)
Of course, most deployments will use much smaller (1-5 mile radius) cells. Also keep in mind that the cells are sectored.