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WiMax Landscape Taking Shape
geekee writes "A front page article in EETimes describes some of the goals, as well as some of the issues, involved in WiMax (802.16a) development. The main goal is to deliver 74Mb/s up to 50 km. One big issue is the tighter specs required when compared with WiFi. "It's a big train wreck, and much more complicated than 802.11a design, especially in terms of dynamic range, spectral range and phase noise in RF," said Colin Howlett, a senior RF engineer at VCom Inc. There are at least 4 known companies working on the RF portion and 4 known companies working on the baseband processing. These companies include Intel, Fujitsu, and Maxim. Another issue is in getting governments to agree on regulation standards for the systems, particularly in the 2.5, 3.5, and 5.8 GHz bands, Inconsistancies exist in the requirements for dynamic frequency selection and transmit power control, as well as spectrum allocation. Cost is also an important factor, since WiMax is positioning itself as an alternative to DSL and Cable, and therefore, companies must be able to offer competitve prices to gain market share."
Here is another good article on Wimax.
WiMax is not a replacement for WiFi, it's a backbone protocol for long-haul RF connections. It'll take place on licensed bandwidth which will be illegal to try to jam, as opposed to WiFi where there's nothing stoping your neighbor from using the same frequencies...
First of all, This will probably not substantially increase bandwidth to target users. Though it might have a higher theoretical maximum, they simply cannot afford to offer more bandwidth than your average cable ISP already provides.
Second of all, I don't think this will necessarily have a lower cost than existing connections. Cable and telephone infrastructure already exists necessarily because of other technologies; that means that cable and dsl providers really don't have much overhead on those technologies (beyond the bandwidth and the routers, which they would need anyway).
Finally, I don't think we have to "hope" that Intel gets sufficient funding; I mean, feel free to donate, but they have enough funding to develop wimax or any other technology for the next millenium.
Beyond all that, this could be a very nice innovation for one reason; Convenience.
No, 802.11 anything is not sufficient.
/. over the last year or two.
My personal experience differs from your statement.
Unless using specialized antennas at both ends, 802.11 would not even be adequate from the utility pole to the house in many circumstances.
The "specialized antennas" are 50 or 60 bucks each, readily available online from many sources. I've been using standard, off-the-shelf Linksys WAP11's and a couple of 24dBi directional antennas, on an 802.11b link, for the last year. I'm 1.1 miles from my source, and have full T1 speeds up and down over this link. I haven't had any outages, from wind, snow, heat, or cold (and it was -7 farenheit this morning).
802.11b is just fine, today, for last-mile solutions, without violating any FCC regulations or custom-fabricating anything. It has even been mentioned a time or 50 on
Even a pair of pringles cans could probably get you a mile.
Anyone who has any experience with wireless ethernet knows that the range is never as good as it's hyped up to be, especially through walls and such.
And yet, with a minimum of equipment, range and walls aren't relevant, for an installation which is no more complicated than installing a satellite dish.
In reality, WiMax cells will only have ~5 mile radius. The cells are also sectorized, so you'd only be sharing the bandwidth with 1/6th of the people within the cell.
There is an effort to setup one of these networks in my county this year (2004). They expect to need two antennas to cover the entire county. Intel and IBM met with the public and municipal officials last week. So far, no company has offered to be the ISP, but BellSouth, Cox, and Alltel are obvious choices. Initially, service will be offered to businesses, later to residential customers. If the project goes through, Intel says this will be the first site in the United States to be covered.
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