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.

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?