WiMax Formed To Promote 802.16 Standard

The Original Yama writes "Intel, Nokia, Proxim, and a bunch of other companies have launched WiMax, a non-profit group founded to certify and promote the IEEE 802.16 wireless networking standard. What's interesting about this standard is that it allows "up to 31 miles of linear service area range and allows users connectivity without a direct line of sight to a base station," all at a shared speed of 70Mbps. This simultaneously blows away 3G mobile and 802.11 technologies."

Comments

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Not exactly, more like more information. The last article didn't mention that the non-profit organization was being formed.

Forget 31 miles

[xeos]

Sounds great, but 31 miles? How about 50 feet though wood and concrete? Line of sight is nice, but for most interesting home networking, there's just no way.

Re:Woohoo! Wait, no...

[redcane]

Obviously if you have a dense population of users it becomes economical to have more base stations in the 31 mile radius, each serving a smaller zone, in the interests of extra bandwidth per user.

Well..

[autopr0n]

I'm assuming it's 70mbps/channel. But for 31 miles there had better be a lot of channels. Could you imagine 9,500 square miles (pi*31^2) of people all sharing the same 10 or so wifi channels? It could suck.

Re:Well..

[Cyberdyne]

I'm assuming it's 70mbps/channel. But for 31 miles there had better be a lot of channels. Could you imagine 9,500 square miles (pi*31^2) of people all sharing the same 10 or so wifi channels? It could suck.

It would suck if used for home connections in a city, certainly - but you wouldn't use it as a DSL-replacement in NYC. For fixed installation in cities, DSL or cable modems will be much better. Out in the countryside, however - cable and DSL can't reach. If you bear in mind the 50:1 contention ratio for DSL, the 70 Mbps would give 7,000 houses the equivalent service of a half-megabit DSL line each. When the alternatives are 56K dialup or satellite, this is a huge leap forward!

Equally, for mobile usage, this could be great. All the homes in NYC on a 70 Mbps channel is a non-starter - but all the laptops sharing a couple of those channels? Could be good - especially if you have a NIC capable of "roaming" between this WiMax and WiFi hotspots. As you leave your home's WiFi coverage, you stay online with WiMax. Back to WiFi as you pick up a coffee in Starbucks, then a short spell on WiMax again until you reach the office. As long as you aren't driving, you could actually get useful work done during the commute: handling email, checking news sites, whatever - and by the time you reach your desk, you're already up to date!

Also: the article talked about "31 linear miles". Is that "anywhere within 31 miles of the base station" or "a footprint 31 miles wide" - i.e. radius or diameter? Since this is marketing-speak, I'm guessing they'd go for the diameter, to make the number bigger, meaning it's more like 2,300 square miles footprint - less in urban areas, due to buildings. Either way, this means a WiMax tower would have the same sort of range as cellphone towers: instead of putting in individual "hotspots" of WiFi where demand is greatest, a company could cover a whole state for data the same way cellphone companies do for voice calls.

Ricochet tried this, but with a proprietary (IIRC) system with much lower data rates and much worse coverage, and still came close to succeeding - it wasn't quite viable, but close. A similar service using WiMax could well make it...

Why bother

[doormat]

I'd take decreased range (5-10 miles) and 100mbit/s thank you very much. Screw that whole "backhaul for 802.11x" crap, you know you'll have end users trying to hook into it. I think it'd be great for universities. One or two WAPs and you're covered. As long as people arent trying to use Kazaa from their psychology class you're OK.