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."

Comments

Martin Cooper on WiFi

[zeoslap]

Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone had this in a recent interview http://news.com.com/2008-1082-995667.html

"Wi-Fi is wonderful. It is a superb local area network--what it was designed to do--and it does that very well. When you try to make Wi-Fi cover a wide area, it's absolutely the worst way to do it. Think about it. In order to cover a city, you need a million sites; we actually did an analysis of that. And every one of them has got to have backhaul. So it turns out it's neither economical nor practical."

I realise this is WiMax but I wonder what they are doing to move beyond the limitations these guys found.

Re:Martin Cooper on WiFi

[petecarlson]

Yes, there is a problem getting bandwidth to hotspots.
I run a wireless "hotspot" in Baltimore which serves a two block area. If I were to bump to a T1 I would need about 50 monthly subscribers to cover costs and a small profit. In order to do this I need to expand my range which means I need to set up additional acess points. The problem is that where the acess points need to be is not line of site to my base station so I would have to have a wired conection to each point or have a series of repeaters. This isn't practicle or cost effective.
If I could set up an 802.16 base pushing bandwidth to five or six 802.11b acess points then I could run them all off of one T1 line and put them in locations where they need to be.

By the time this arrives...

[path_man]

...the CDMA carriers (SprintPCS and Verizon) will have 2Mbps 1xEVDO (TRUE 3G networks) up and active. The biggest single limiting factor to creating a wireless infrastructure is that somewhere it has to tie into fibre optics. Wireless carriers, nacent though the technology is today, have this figured out. Some xx,000 wireless radio towers all terminate at a base station connected to real telco networks.

Creating new wireless networks for purposes of roaming inside a metropolitan area seems like a big waste of resources -- especially considering that wireless carriers have already figured this out.

2Mbps SHARED, max few 100Kbps

[univgeek]

You wanna share 2Mbps,( and pay through your nose), or you wanna share 11Mbps (.11b), 54Mbps(.11a,g) ??

Especially if this is a fixed application, and doesn't need to be truly mobile?