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WiMax: When, Not If
Omega1045 writes "An article over at SiliconValley.com got me excited about the new WiMax Technology that over 140 companies and organizations are pushing. The article is a little low on the technical side of things, but discusses a possible 10-mile range for the wireless technology. Many see this as a nice solution for the "last mile" problem. Similar technologies have seen a lot of hype before, but with the likes of Intel, Dell, British Telecom, AT&T and bunch of the Ma Bells, I think one can be forgiven for getting a little excited. If you are still skeptical, you can download the 'Complete Guide to WiMax.'"
Oh. Right. It's encrypted... Right? What if they're able to break that encryption in 5-10 years? They'll still have all my data...
No thanks....
I suspect that was a throw-away to catch out people who don't rtfa. It actually links to "Excited state" ..."An excited state of an atom, molecule or nucleus possesses more energy than the ground state ... The lifetime of an atom, molecule or nucleus in an excited state is usually short. Molecules return to the ground state from an excited state by releasing energy. Its true!"
How about that idea? Wouldn't that be a great competition for expensive mobile phone plans?
Some of my MIS teachers at U of H were talking about the school being a test location for it. Except, they said it would have a 20 mile range. I think they also mentioned that the students would be able to access it. "Free" high speed internet would be cool to have.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
Won't we need a pretty big radio transmitter to transmit to an access point that is 10 miles away? Wouldn't it drain laptop battery in no time?
That's true, and WiMax will definately be a good thing for wireless ISPs, but for Joe Average who just wants to surf the web from his couch on a laptop, WiFi just works. WiMax is likely to suffer in the consumer market due to WiFi being good enough. After all, it isn't always that the best or most hyped technologies win out.
Wardriving is history now.
Imagine the potentials of hacking in to systems by just sitting inside your room - welcome to Airdriving.
On the other hand, this standard will be very useful for new countries(eg: India) trying to play big in the broadband scenario, since it needs very less infrastucture(no need to laying cable's).
The WLAN cards will become cheaper once the taiwanese starts to clone.
This may not sound like wonderful news to those countries with a comprehensive telecommunications infrastructure, such as the USA, Asia and parts of Europe, but for countries with smaller infrastructures, it's great news.
South Africa, where I live, has a 'first world' infrastructure for the majority of uses, but for broadband internet, we simply don't cut it yet. Broadband is priced at a premium, with your average 512k ADSL connection 3 times the cost of developed countries and capped at 3gig a month.
Recently, we saw the introduction of Sentech Mywireless, using technology from IPWireless - the UMTS Standard. They had some major teething problems initially, but seem to be stabalising thier operations after loosing a lot of customers due to poor service implementation (read: underestimated the demand)
Later this year, a competitor, iBurst, who are already conducting tests, will roll out thier service with an official opening in the first quarter of 2005 - they currently run the Lotto network in South Africa. They'll be using IntelliCell technology from ArrayComm.
And finally, our wonderfull national telecom company (Telkom), who still hold the monopoly despite deregulation, will be introducing WiMax technology to South Africa in 2005 in partnership with Intel.
For a country starved of broadband options for years, wireless technology has become "the holy grail" of broadband for South Africans.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
You missing the point that the FCC still regulates the entire radio spectrum, including the microwave frequencies used by WiFi.
It's not "deregulation" that has promoted such fecundity in the wireless networking arena. It's the fact that the FCC has regulated that part of the spectrum in a way that the average person is able to participate in.
Specifically, it's the fact that the FCC chose not to require a license to broadcast at those frequencies (at least, under a certain strength). Before you think that this lesson could be applied to the current AM/FM spectrum, keep in mind that there are already bands for everything else, so it's not economically viable to put a television station (for example) at the WiFi spectrum--for one you'd have to convince Sony and RCA, etc, to make new TVs.
If the FM band, for example, were unlicensed, what would there be to stop someone from hijacking a popular station? Say the Rush Limbaugh/Al Franken station (whichever you'd rather listen to)? As you're driving along, some company whose sole source of income is advertising puts up antennae along the highway and broadcasts over Franken/Limbaugh. The system breaks down.
Now, I don't mean to say that the current scheme (for AM/FM/TV) is very good (in fact, I think it's awful), but deregulation in the Libertarian sense is not the answer.
Just one example (out of many potential ideas) would be to sanction a non-profit industry group with a socially progressive charter as the arbiter of some band (say, the AM band). Allow the citizen/government oversight of that organization (within clearly defined limits, such as the government couldn't suppress free speech and the like). Then, the industry group (similar to the W3C or the IETF) would define the system under which Clear Channel, your local community station, Sony, etc, would be bound to.
If done well, such a system would overwhelmingly outshine our current morass, and that was just a spur of the moment idea. I'm sure a dedicated group could do even better.
As many people are sure to point out, there's the possibility of using WiMAX for VoIP but that's too blas'e. What would be interesting is providing a mobile like user experience using VoIP+WiMAX, thereby challenging the commercial wireless carriers (read guys with big $$). But before we get to that we need to note that for VoIP (sent over any wireless medium) to rival a cellular voice offering, a user really has to be mobile and should be able to carry a small piece of equipment a la a mobile phone to be able to access the network. With VoIP, using say Wi-Fi, the user is expected to lug around at least a laptop and if she doesn't have one, she's got to be tied to the PC at home. If a truly mobile, VoIP service could be provided over something like WiMAX which uses free spectrum, just imagine the savings that could be made by whoever's providing the service.
:-)
Coming back to WiMAX, there is better scope to channel VoIP traffic (along with user mobility) over WiMAX than over WiFi for several reasons, bandwidth being only one of them. For any kind of wireless telephony to be taken seriously, the handoff problem needs to be solved in a clean way. The commercial cellular offerings have no issues in handling handoffs and in providing true mobile service over large geographical areas. With Wi-Fi's range being much shorter than that of WiMAX, providing wireless telephony with handoffs over Wi-Fi for even a medium sized city will mean that the entire region be covered by hundreds (if not thousands) of access points. This complicates both the RF network planning as well as managing of the core network (the backend) which actually handles and routes the calls/handoffs. With WiMAX's larger range, the complexity of these problems gets reduced.
So how does geek community make money out of this ?
1. Try to make a portable WiMAX device which can handle VoIP on the lines of a mobile phone. This is not as difficult as it sounds. The VoIP protocols have been ported to embedded devices before. All this device would need are a WiMAX chip, VoIP protocols, some DSP to handle digitized voice and a minimal user intrface (at least to start with).
2. Get the core network to handle multiple WiMAX access points, do handoffs, route calls etc. This is also not too difficult. There's free software for things distributed call handling, fault management etc, some of it even from telecom companies like Ericsson.
3. Get taken seriously. This is probably going to be the biggest challenge (Sigh !) and I don't know how the average geek can do that
4. This is the step we all love - Profit !!!
Using WiMAX to run Skype etc over it isn't that great. If someone could go to the next level and use the range + bandwidth of WiMAX to actually provide a cellular like mobile service, then there's scope for making a lot of money.
Sorry for the long post.
In cities, WiMax will enable cellular and wireless companies bypass Telco's through urban mesh networks. And with it's 40Km range it's possible to begin reaching out to the last mile crowd in a way that has not been possible until now.
IMO the first cellular company that can roll out large scale mesh networks in tower dense urban areas letting them not pay several thousand dollars a month per tower will have a huge economic advantage over their competitors.
The key words in your post are: over flat terrain.
I work for a wireless ISP using Canopy equipment. It works excellent when you have line of sight. A company in a good location, say West Texas, could make some money. But if you happen to be in say, East Texas, where there are tons of hills and trees, it is horrible.
Canopy is and was ahead of its time. But before this stuff really takes off, the Line of Sight issue is going to have to be done away with.
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
> deregulation in the Libertarian sense is not the answer.
> Just one example (out of many potential ideas) would be to sanction a non-profit industry group
> with a socially progressive charter as the arbiter
What you describe is "in the Libertarian sense."
Why do people think Libertarians want total ruleless chaos? I think we want society mostly the way it is today, but with independent organizations keeping market order rather than the government (exactly the situation you describe).
Being against goverment regulation of the spectrum doesn't mean we don't want it regulated at all. I am also again public education. It doesn't mean I don't think people should be educated. It means that I think private organizations would do a better job than the government.
Submitter here. It was a joke and also to see if people RTFA. You will notice the other links all go to a ton of info on WiMax.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein