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WiMax Technology Could Blanket the US?
obiwan2u writes "According to an article on WiMaxTrends, the metropolitan area wireless networking technology (MLAN) called WiMax could reach 90% of the mainland US population if about $3 billion was spent on infrastructure. The 802.16 standard specifies a max range of about 30 miles and a max speed of about 70 Mbits/sec, but typical ranges and speeds will typically be smaller. 802.16/WiMax specifies various licensed (3.5Ghz) and unlicensed (5Ghz) frequency ranges but the unlicensed ranges have Wi-Fi like transmitting power restrictions. More background on this technology can be seen at: WiMax starting to make its move and 802.16: Medium distance wireless networking that could change the world?"
I thought mlan was something else...
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Where here is Jacksonville FL,
St Cloud MN,
Abilene TX,
Daytona Beach FL....
That's true if you're always uploading just as much as you download. The vast majority of people will be mostly downloading, so the half-duplex won't half the speed.
I assume that 70Mbps is per channel. Add several sub channels and a web of towers and it could be substantial. As it is, ATSC allows a 20MBps connection over a single television channel, and it looks like WiMax is looking to make otherwise unused television bands easier to licence.
Also, with internet service, I was told by an ISP guy that oversell ratios are often in the 50:1 ratio and it still nets very acceptable connection rates. You could probably sell 580 6Mbps accounts and still get the advertised speed. Multiply that by the number of channels available and you could serve a pretty substantial customer base.
" About the Author: Caroline Gabriel is Research Director of Rethink Research Associates and Editor of WiMAX Watch, a newsletter providing in-depth analysis of the WiMAX market. She is a featured columnist for Trendsmedia's WiMAX Trends, and is a leading industry analyst on wireless and wireless broadband technologies. She recently authored WiMAX Business Models 2004-2007: How to Make Money in WiMAX, published in the US/Canada by Trendsmedia. For further information, email info@trendsmedia.com"
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It is true that the claimed wireless bitrates never stack against the real bitrates, I think it is a bit much to assume ISPs will ever allow full rate uploads on consumer internet connections.
Also, 70Mbps is probably the total for a single channel. Add multiple channels and several towers and you can probably serve a medium to high density city.
On average, yes. But the typical cable modem connection in the US also offers somewhat less than dial-up speed. If every user tried to access the Internet at exactly the same time, they would receive between 40 and 50 kbps service, depending on which cable provider they used. Of course, due to the magic of stat muxing, this never happens, and people are (mostly) very happy with their multi-megabps download speeds. (DSL, of course, is a different matter entirely, since that access network is not a shared medium.)
http://www.tvb.org/rcentral/mediatrendstrack/tvbas ics/02_TVHouseholds.asp
Percentage of Households with a TV: 98.2 down from a high of 98.4. Of course, this combines Cable and Megawatt transmitters, but that will give you an idea. If you have cable, you already have internet accesibility.
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That is a half-duplex signaling rate. Actual throughput is much less. Plus there aren't a lot of channels to use. 5.8Ghz is unlicensed, so that will be used up quickly. 3.5Ghz isn't available for us in the US. 2.5Ghz is all owned by Sprint/Nextel, Bellsouth, and Clearwire. Of those 3, only 1 is even interested in WiMax and they have the least amount of spectrum.
WiMax is only a big deal in developing countries currently.
I doubt it, unlike the IEEE wireless standards, 3G networks are actually designed to scale up to country wide coverage while providing access to hundreds/thousands of users per node rather than a few dozen at most.
Jilles
(DSL, of course, is a different matter entirely, since that access network is not a shared medium.)
I think that's incorrect. DSL isn't shared at the neighborhood level like cable, but at some point, you are connected to a model pool and share the bandwidth from that pool to the rest of the internet.
I don't know how this works out in the real world, but it's very possible to have network slowdown due to other users all being very busy, if it's a small relay that hundreds are connected to.
Sounds like you haven't seen a WiMax radio, which is much larger than a cell phone. (People are talking about mobile WiMax, but it's vaporware.)
Even if your cable is busy in the evening, it's still much better than dial-up.
Probably.
However, the upload speed on cable is bad, and hurts roundtrip latency.
So you can download a movie trailer superquick, but sending the clicks out to Amazon to get to the trailer may be kind of poky.
For example, on World of Warcraft, with my RADSL 1.5/768Mbps, I get a latency of 26ms. People on cable modems of 3+ Mbps often report a latency of 5 times mine.
Share and Enjoy!
Only if you don't mind taking a step back in terms of functionality. WiMAX doesn't support handover/handoff between cells and maintaining a call currently. They're talking about it but it is (as someone else mentioned) vaporware.
Plus, if this is unlicensed, then how are you going to provide SLAs to your customers that allow speech?