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Nextel Jumps into Wide-Area Wireless Broadband

Posted by simoniker on from the lots-of-bits dept.

Atryn writes "Nextel Communications appears to be entering the world of wireless wide-area broadband technology. A new site showed up today describing their market level trial of Flash OFDM technology. Using a PCMCIA Type II modem card in your laptop or a tethered modem, you can have speeds of 1.5 Mbps (bursting to 3 Mbps) downstream and 375 Kbps (bursting to 750 Kbps) upstream as described here. They also appear to be seeking seeking trial participants, who, when selected, will get the technology free of charge! Of course, you need to be in North Carolina."

6 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Low latency by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Latency refers to the time it takes for data to travel between sender and receiver, and is very important in real-time applications. Nextel Wireless Broadband's latency, or average delay, is 100ms or below.

    http://www.nextelbroadband.com/lrn_about_what_is _w ireless.html

  2. Re:WiMax anyone by Saiboogu · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm in the first teier of support at Nextel -- We haven't heard a word of this until about 24 hours ago. A dedicated group was trained to support the trial, and if this rolls out full scale, that group would just be expanded (following the pattern of past trials for specialized services, and the current method of supporting data services). Nextel likes to compartmentalize everything as much as possible.

  3. Re:Low latency by liquidweb · · Score: 4, Informative

    Posted link is broken.

    http://www.nextelbroadband.com/lrn_about_what_is_w ireless.html

    Is the correct link which does indeed state:

    Nextel Wireless Broadband's latency, or average delay, is 100ms or below.

    --
    --- Matthew Hill
    "To quote the self is an act of the self riteous and uninitiated sub-moronic" - Matthew Hill
  4. Re:Nothing like a company CEO with wireless laptop by mikehilly · · Score: 5, Informative

    "Basically i'm asking, what will the price on this be?"

    Verizon currently has a similar technology that is in the testing phase in DC and San Diego. The monthly cost for it is $79.99 for unlimited bandwidth usage. I figure that Nextel will have to price it somewhat competitively. Eventually, the price will come down (hopefully) to around $50 or $60 and I might think about replacing my Road Runner with one of the High Speed Wan plans.
  5. Windows only! by Mur! · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm in the trial area and started filling out the form to be a tester, until it got to the system requirements, which were basically Windows XP/2000. I think ME might have been listed. They specifically said they don't support Macintosh or other OSes at this time.

    I have to wonder if there's some Windows-only software that they're using for the connection, or if they just don't want the hassle of trying to deal with connection issues from other OSes. Does anyone have similar technology running under Linux?

  6. WiMax only supports FIXED endpoints. by threeturn · · Score: 4, Informative
    WiMax isn't competing with Nextel's solution. To quote WiMax's own information page WiMax supports " fixed broadband wireless access systems"

    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.