Nextel Jumps into Wide-Area Wireless Broadband

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."

Comments

sounds like a cool idea

[rock_climbing_guy]

I'd like to see this in action. It would be great if they could use this technology to reach customers that other broadband companies won't touch. If not, just having them for price competition should be nice. Then again, there is the portability feature.

I wonder if they'll try to squeeze money out of us by charging us for "romaing?" Also, I'm sure that privacy advocates will be concerned about the ability of Nextel or any other provider to track their customers and that information will inevitably be shared with the FBI, et al.

Re:Low latency

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Nothing like a company CEO with wireless laptop

[mikehilly]

"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.