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Australia to Become WiMax Testbed
shrewd writes "AU News site Whirlpool has news on a huge AUD $37 million investment by Intel in a WiMax project. From the article: 'Australia will become the world's testbed for WiMAX - Intel's wireless broadband technology - with the announcement that the chip giant will invest AUD $37million in the expansion of the Unwired network in Australia ... Unwired CEO David Spence said the investment will make WiMAX an absolutely mainstream technology. 'Unwired will be in the unique position of having access to the majority of the WiMAX-designated 3.5 GHz and 2.3 GHz licensed bands in Australia's major metropolitan areas,' Spence said.'"
This is kind of old news, Unwired have talked about this for a while. I'm an Unwired user in Sydney and I get awesome results, i've been able to use it across the span of 30km's.
I heard about this a while ago I can't recite the source, but when I spoke to the Unwired consultants they said they were looking into this for sometime next year.
The only benefit this will provide me as an existing customer of Unwired is hopefully better pricing, coverage in trouble spots and I would be able to use the service while roaming as opposed to having to log in everytime I change to a different suburb.
That said we also have http://www.iburst.com.au/ (iburst) who provide true roaming, but their plans are ridiculously expensive.
What's more interesting news for me is the announcement Unwired recently made of a partnership with an Australian company called Engin http://www.engin.com.au/ who are an awesome VoIP provider (I also use).
That does remind me, the only place I had trouble with reception using Unwired was in an apartment block 30+ floors up.
-Sj53
A nationwide wimax effort by Craig McCaw, and is being beta tested across the US at the moment. Starts at $30 a month, and completely portable (bring the modem with you). http://www.clearwire.com/
You, like many other people on this board, appear to NOT know what WiMax is. WiMax is not the "cell phone" version of WiFi, it's a last-mile solution for fixed locations. It's basically a wireless version of DSL and cable modems.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
It depends on your definition of free. If one pays $100 on insulating ones house and it save $200 in heating and air conditioning cost than I would say the insulation was more than free as it was a money maker. This will be the case with broadband as it will save more money in other expenses than it will cost.
It's the flatest continent, so there shouldn't be a lot of line of sight issues and the remote cattle stations certainly would be users that would benefit from long distance wireless internet.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
We're a big continent with relatively few people (just passed 20 million recently). So most wired technologies aren't economically feasable outside of the metropolitan centres. The only reason that the bush has any telephone service at all is because Telstra started as a government-owned company (Telecom Australia). Almost half of it has already been sold off (so it's still government controlled) and now it looks certain that the rest will be sold as well. There's been all sorts of promises about maintaining services to the bush, but it's already bad enough and I can only see it getting worse. Deployment of WiMax (or something like it) might be the future of communications in regional areas. Expect to see WiMax/VOIP mobile phones soon. I reckon that's where it's headed - a unified IP network for voice and data.
In many areas, it's not been so bad since ISPs took things into their own hands and started installing their own DSL equipment at the exchanges - I'm sitting here in South Melbourne on ADSL2 (only 12mbs at the moment), paying about US$70 per month for 80GB downloads, unlimited 1mbs upload - more than I generally need.
The thing is, i'm moving to San Francisco in about a month, and I'm yet to find any plans over there that match this (I could be wrong - I haven't spent THAT much time looking).
Down here in New Zealand i have been running on a generally available WiMax system for about 2 months now, and it have been available well before that.
Guess I must have dreamed that.
Nice strong 1Mbit/512Kbit (down/up) link at around 4Km from the transmitter on 3.5GHz.
Only about 30% more expensive than wired ADSL broadband, which is not available here as we have fibre bearers out here in the country (go figure, Telecom wont install local DSLAMS).
There are tons of these system rolled out over here, have been for quite some time.
It's the flatest continent
Except for the Great Dividing Range along the eastern coast, which is where about 3/4 of Australia's population lives. There's plenty of hills big enough to block line of sight anywhere in Australia - and the places where there isn't any hills, well, line of sight isn't far enough to get to the next outpost.
the remote cattle stations certainly would be users that would benefit from long distance wireless internet.
Except that this is *still* not long-distance enough. 100km is the distance to an average cattle station's back gate - and at the other side of that? Another cattle station. You might as well put a microwave link in, or go satellite, or rip out every single bit of copper wire left in rural australia and go with fiber (rumoured to cost upwards of AUD30 billion).
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.