The Future of Wireless Connectivity

Unimonomous writes "CoolTechZone.com analyzes the future of wireless connectivity with WiMax standard. "WiMax is an upgrade from Wi-Fi and offers brilliant advantages over its predecessor. The obvious one being extended range (up to 15 miles), which means that establishing a few towers would pretty much make the entire city connected. Now this probably won't matter to those of us with 24/7 connectivity, but people living in rural and undeveloped areas would surely benefit from it." Update looks like the site buckled. Sorry.

Comments

Wireless

[certel]

Wireless connectivity will open a lot of windows for future products. As mentioned in as EBay article regarding voice calls being free in the future, things like wireless networks will definitely make that a reality.

Line of sight still, though..

[xtal]

The added range will help, but there's lots of antennas out there that will give you good reliability over long distances.

The bigger problem is line of sight distances. I've done some testing with this and have the advantage of living on top of a very big hill, within view of DSL - about 5km over a lake. We've gotten connections with very crude antennas already using GPS to line things up reasonably well.

The big limitation has always been line of sight, and WiMax does nothing to change this - and might hurt, if it fragments 802.11b. Wimax (802.16?) is not compatible with .11, and I'm not sure it will succeed.

Re:Line of sight still, though..

[Anonymous Coward]

And the LOS problem along with stupid regulations (banning of towers in the entire county for example where I'm at). Are going to hold back it regardless. No matter how many fancy tricks you throw at it, 2.4+ spectrum isn't going to work well in a non-line of sight setup.

That and Wi-Max 802.16d is already considered a dead tech with 802.16e being its replacement. 802.16e is currently being targeted at only licensed bands, (2.5, 3.2, etc) which means big companies are the ones that will be able to do it, not the small local ISP.

What about security?

[d'oh89]

Ok, let's say 5 years down the road most folks use WiMax for internet connectivity along the same lines of coverage that broadband follows. How secure are those connections going to be? With my cable modem at least i can stick a firewall between me and all the nasties out there. What I can't imagine is how Joe Schmoe is going to protect his PC enough so that he doesn't get comprimised by a hacker/slacker. People have enough of a time configuring their wireless routers...Now imagine having to connect to a tower 5 miles away where there's a lot of ohter folks doing the same thing. What can one do to protect themselves?

Of interest to not just rural/remote people

[Safe Sex Goddess]

WiMAX is of interest to those in urban areas who are working to provide universal net access to even those who can't afford $50/month. I think Municipalities could probably find ways to offer free wireless internet in their communities if they are creative. For example, they could offer free municipal wireless with the excuse that they want to provide job search capabilities to everyone in their community. Also providing access to any local, state, or .gov site. And what about include access to any non-profit site, and also to any site offering free e-mail. Add a little peer-to-peer networking between people using the same free networks and who needs any corporate advertisements or sites or access to the "private subscriber" side of the internet?

Overhyped

[Anonymous Coward]

Just from the intro (site still buckled) it sounds like an overly hyped analysis of 802.16. Sure, the technology promises to provide wireless broadband to the masses and to some extent that is correct, however 15 miles is probably referring to a point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connectivity from a base station to basestation architecture. 802.16e, or, the mobile side of WiMax is the ultimate end user standard not yet finalized (e.t.a. 2007). This standard has much less range - typically 3 miles or less for portable and mobile users. How does this footprint differ from cellular broandband? Differing modulation schemes, power usage, frequencies, etc is a start, but the underlying advantages of this technolgy versus cellular broadband are still untested and definitely a long way to go before they become implemented. It's hard to say if this technology will still provide us with a competitive market over the growing cellular broadband market.

Re:gl hf... not going to see it in rural areas

[QuantumRiff]

Really, I think you misunderstand Rural. We are not talking about BFE, where your neighbor is the driveway 10 miles down the dirt road. Rural in the US seems to be pretty much any town less than 100,000. (At least out here in the west). My rural town (Klamath Falls, OR) is 40k people, living in one basin, but with lots of sprawl. Lots are huge here, 1 acre lots in the middle of town are not uncommon at all. This is an old town, with very old infrastructure. (its actually very similar to Hermiston,OR in population density.) To wire up the town, it would take an insane amount of fiber, and then the last mile stuff. When the cable company wired up the town, it took dozens of teams to pull all the fiber. Figure those guys were making something like $30 an hour (prevailing wage). Figure on the sheer amount of equipment needed, trucks, fiber converters, tearing up streets, etc. Now, look at putting up 3 towers around town with wireless. Even if you have to pay $50k or more per tower, it is damn cheap. YOu can then turn around and sell your service for much less than a fixed infrastructure, because you have much less invested in installation and maintenance. And with cheaper service, especiallly in a "rural" town where the mean wage is much less then the bigger cities, your going to get a hell of a lot more customers. (lots of people can't afford $45/month for internet)

So, i guess my point, since i got sidetracked, is that smaller communities can be quickly setup, with it being very easy to "blanket" a smaller rural town, and start building up revenue streams. Especially when you consider that rural areas don't have as much competition. I could spend $150k, and get 5000 customers paying $15 a month all within a few months.. whereas in a bigger city, you could get more revenue per tower, but not nearly as quickly, as you need more towers to cover the city (higher infrastructure costs), and lots more competetion.

High Speed community networks?

[tji]

When thinking about what WiMax will offer us, I am not sure what all the advantages will be. Obviously, the current Wireless network ISPs will be able to support a much larger area, making them a lot more useful.

Beyond that, you have all the same limitations as current ISPs (i.e. I don't see this giving me a low cost 30Mbps connection.. hopefully DSL or Cable will eventually do this).

But, in relatively dense areas, I see some cool possibilities in community networks. In these, we don't worry about a big pipe to the Internet, which would be expensive. We just join a local network and share resources at high speeds.

As it is now, if i leave my upload speed reasonable on P2P apps, it quickly swamps my outbound bandwidth and all my Internet access goes to crap. P2P networks, file servers, could be a lot more useful at high LAN speeds -- and most people would be more willing to serve at high speeds when it doesn't effect their Internet connection.

Even sharing huge files, like HDTV programs, could be feasible on the local networks.

Link a few of these WiMax networks together, and you can get some huge alternate networks, where people provide useful services for their communities. Without bandwidth costs, it becomes very cheap.. I can easily set up a Linux box to dedicate to this network for a couple hundred bucks.