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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."

4 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: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
  3. 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.
  4. 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.