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Australian ISP Unveils WiMax Like Card
krispy78 writes "If you're looking forward to the day your laptop has WiMax built in and can access wireless broadband as easily as WiFi, you're not alone. But the 802.16e mobile WiMax standard is yet to be finalized on paper, and we'll be lucky to see it the first products this side of 2007. In Australia, a wireless PCMCIA card has been released that comes close to the "WiMax ideal". It appears to Windows like a regular WiFi card (no heinous login clients to run) but can pick up wide-area wireless broadband signals. The network that runs the cards ("Navini Ripwave") is apparently being rolled out in USA and other countries too."
Ireland had this for a while, and a lot of people arent happy with the service, hopefully the aussies will do a better job. If your interested check out www.irishbroadband.ie, they also sell "ripwave" modems.
That thing must really have an amazing range!
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I'm using a desktop rabbit unit right now, just plug your ethernet in and your on. No phone line, no ADSL bullshit, no headache when moving.
Also good for test when at a client site. Wireless broadband is the greatest!
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1) Unwired (www.unwired.com.au) unleashes this card.
2) John Howard knows how to take care of the muzzie extremists before they strike.
3) We will phase out analog TV before the USA.
4) Topless beaches.
5) 3G phone systems. How's that UTMS going you AT&T/Cingular tards?
6) Topless beaches.
7) It's far from America and even further from England.
8) Car accidents are called "smashes"
9) Drunk driving is called "drink driving"
If you live anywhere else, WAYSA?
This device works across a wide range, from 2-6ghz. WiMax, being part of the 802.16 spec, can hop all around that range.
So then, I have question for the better informed (considering that any real information on Navini's site is very effectively obscured under a deluge of marketing babble). Does this device support the accessing of 802.11 networks as well? The article summary seem to infer it: [the card] appears to Windows like a regular WiFi card... Also, (from TFA) the card's hardware includes a range of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chips. Does this mean it COULD support 802.11 with a change of firmware? I imagine this functionality would be welcomed by many.
And how well could it work on an open platform - like GNU/Linux or FreeBSD. I use two laptops on and off, borrowed from office. They run FreeBSD or RHEL (and are re-imaged on return). I'm still wondering whether I should get a wireless WAN card for India.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
You aussies have computers?!
For those of us who want wireless broadband today, Sprint and Verzion both offer 1x EV-DO (about 512k, 200-300ms latency) in the US for about $60. There aren't any bandwidth caps, but you probably get cut off if you download 80GB.
You aussies have computers?!
Yeah, but we run into problems, because the endianness switches once you are south of the equator.
Hyped up the Australian angle? It mentioned the word "Australia" once as the place the card was available.
Maybe someday Australians won't suffer from cultural cringe and feel the need to wince whenever their country is mentioned in public.....
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NOW Broadband www.now.com have a similar service in the UK but it's not PCMCIA yet. They use IP Wireless www.ipwireless.com which is a 3g (but for data only) type system and whom according to their website have a PCMCIA card version so maybe NOW will have PCMCIA soon too. But for now, only in London.
On the plus side, it allows us to run MacOS on our AMD/Intel beige boxes.
(My deepest apologies, but I can't pass up the opportunity)
I think the submission only makes such a big deal out of it because it must have been really tough to develop this while fighting off dingos and kangaroos and crocodiles and throwing boomerangs around and playing didgeridoos.
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That would only stop once the USA finally shot Irwin.
"Cricky would you look at the bullet"
The WiMax card was not developed by an Australian ISP, they are just one ISP participating in the trial. Why say "Australian ISP Unveils WiMax Like Card" when the card was developed by a Texan company, and the ISP just happen to be using it.
welcome our kangaroo riding boomerang wielding overlords?
What is the range of this product? When I think WiMax I think 15 miles or so. Nowhere is there any mention of how far you can be away of the antenna.
If the range is the same as iBurst I don't see much improvement. Only pricing will make a difference.
No, I think it's fair. :)
We also wince when your country is mentioned.
(Though not so much as we do 'their' country, ugh.)
Yeah yeah, I know grandparent is an Aussie...
if you throw a boomerang and it doesn't come back,
what do you call it?
.
.
.
a stick
I love that joke. Ya, I know, I need help :-)
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
FTFA
What's particularly impressive about Unwired's card over all other solutions is that it doesn't need any godawful proprietary software clients to log in to the network.
Except Windows.
In insecure Australia, story goes an about AU!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Unwired - http://www.unwired.com.au/index.php already have a rollout with plenty of coverage around Sydney. http://www.unwired.com.au/availability/index.php
f =18
iBurst (flash warning) - http://www.iburst.com.au/ are implementing rollout now.
Discussion form for wireless isps here:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-threads.cfm?
Yeah, but they're not as good as those one you guys have. We have to turn our monitors upside down to get a decent picture, for example, and all the electrons flow around the machine backwards.
English, actually.
They claim rates of 744Kbit/s but my 802.11b cards get twice that. I know that 802.16 has the advantage of greater range but it also operates in the 10GHz+ so if data rates are proportional to signal baud then data rates should be much higher, right?
Also, in physics there's measurement called "skin depth" which is the distance a wave travels in a non conducting medium before it's power level drops by 1/e or about 1/3 and for which the formula is (wavelength/2*pi). The higher the freq the greater the drop off.
I'm not doubting the 20km+ claims of 802.16 but given the FCC power limits of about 10mW per channel I can't figure out how they're getting a greater range than the lower freq 802.11.
That said, I suspect part of the problem is Irish BB's implementation of Ripwave - even their premium services have severe problems, so who knows? The Aussies may luck out.
That's nice.
How does it work with (for instance) Mac OS X, Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6, or the current versions of NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD?
It's fucking sick that EVEN ON SLASHDOT, it's usually safe (and considered, by the majority, to be inoffensive) to assume that Everyone Runs Windows.
(I guess that's why it's "News for Nerds". "Nerds" run Windows; "Geeks" run Unix, eh?)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Is this something that can be bought by an average person and used to set up a FreeWan Cell, or is it just another product that is going to be dominated by some large company. If this is something that used by the average person to set up a network without having to pay a fee to some company, then it just may very well be one of the greatest innovations for amnkind. Imagine being able to transfer information at high speeds and low cost without some government or corporate Kommissar monitoring your every move. This would sound very nice to me.
Don't .ie and .au both have ISPs which charge per-minute or per-kilobyte fees, mostly because they can get away with it because "it's always been that way?"
This is what I'm told the situation was like in Dublin last year (ca. middle of 2004), anyway. And I remember from being there in '99-'00 that it was easily as bad - there was essentially no such thing as broadband and the fees for dial-up were outrageous.
+++ATH0
I'm confused how all of this is "new".
I've used one in the US at an installation, but I'm not sure exactly how much I can say about it. We were considering buying one and requested a demo of a live site by the company.
Navini has a couple dozen, maybe 100, maybe more installations in the states. They use an antenna array, proprietary and disturbingly expensive multi-antenna controller, and some patented version of orthoganal beam forming. They also only sell one unlicensed product in the 2.4 range. The rest are from 2.1-2.3, 2.6, and a 5.x that I don't recall.
In our real life tests on a live system, the portable USB/ethernet modem device was good for about 5-6 miles outdoors in a moving vehicle, and 2-3 miles if it was indoors. The entire backplane was 12MBps..which as anybody will tell you, under load, will barely qualify as "Broadband."
Additionally, a telco has deployed an older Navini system where I live. It..doesn't work so well inside. It *does* work, however, with a laptop and a modem about anywhere in town (their installation is on a *very* high peak).
Overall, we decided against the system because it just didn't perform that well. It would have been a multi-hundred-thousand dollar install, potentially, for a 12Mbit backplan to deliver rural-only broadband. Navini, though, has done amazing work and real-life data aside, the implementation is brilliantly conceived. It's not exactly WiMax. Since the WiMax 'standard' is still sort of....*shrug*...they can say about anyting they want. It's similar to the standard, and it does work in some limited fashion...but it's still wireless.
-Y
Just out of curiosity, who's that with? I didn't even know anyone did wireless broadband in Canberra...
iBurst's coverage is really good in Canberra now. They've pretty much got most of the city covered.