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Companies Betting on WiMAX
PreacherTom writes "This week, two companies — NextWave and Clearwire — filed to go public and make their fortunes with WiMAX, a wireless broadband technology expected to make serious inroads into the telecom market by offering a high-speed alternative to DSL, Cable, and other current offerings. Market researcher Gartner Dataquest expects the North American WiMAX services market to swell from 30,000 connections in 2006 to 21.2 million by 2011. Could this be the new backbone of the mobile effort?"
Gartner Dataquest expects the North American WiMAX services market to swell from 30,000 connections in 2006 to 21.2 million by 2011
In the first 3 years of national cellular service, 69.8 million connections were maintained by just under 300 million Americans. They are expecting 21.2 million connections in 7 years. Hell, even the telegraph the Model T (100% proprietary - a single company, Ford, produced it) made a comparatively bigger impact.
Wireless (GSM) data is expensive. You need to pay out the nose for it, and you're probably going to need a bulky contract.
If WiMAX lets me connect my devices "in the wild" at a reasonable price and without a hefty contract, then it'll be a winner.
To businesses, nobody's going to drop Verizon or Sprint or Cingular or TMobile's data services for a new offering as long as they're already in an existing relationship and entrenched in hardware (sorry, we just moved to Treos or Blackberries). It's the you and me's of the world -- and we need cheap devices, contracts and rates, or it's just another "thing" that our company pays for.
Has anyone considered the effect of Wombats on the signal? With the ever increasing number of Wombats in our urban centers, surely they will cause interference with the signal. I, for one, would not invest in either of these companies until this is researched and properly documented. After all, who wants to be walking in the park and have their connection go down everytime a wombat goes by?
I live in Lake County, California, and the whole frippin' county is in the sticks but I currently live further into the sticks than most and I'm moving to a new house that is closer to my work but even further away from the masses of residences. I just found out that it might be possible to get cable where I'm leaving, but I know damned well you can't get it (or DSL) where I'm going. That leaves dialup or satellite. Pretty much every satellite provider has been known to institute special bullshit "only for you" caps on their subscribers that actually use the connection they're paying for.
The only downside to WiMax is that it will probably come to my town last, and by then I will have spent $600 on satellite hardware :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sure there's the speed, that's great... but the range is key here. Ya see wirless is one of those techs where the providers have an automatic monopoly on service. Let's take the local Starbucks, the shopping mall, the airport... generally you're only going to have access to a single network in those locations. Automatic monopoly of wireless services = $40 a month service fees if you're lucky.
Now compare this to my condo, there's generally four to eight wireless networks in range in any room of the house. Some are locked, and some are open. I have my own closed network not broadcasting it's SSID, but the point is plenty of options.
Soon imagine a world where you go to Starbucks, the mall or the airport and you see four to eight wireless networks available. Hmmm... shall I join the local wireless business club for more than I pay for broadband at home, or shall I jump on "FreeWiMAX" instead?
Most likely some sort of ad-supported "FreeWiMAX" network will pop up all over, also some home users, etc... with varying levels of speed and quality, but the point is the local providers have lost their monopoly of service in their areas and finally wireless charges will have to drop and they'll need to actually compete.
WHEEEEEEE!!!
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...if they can provide an last-mile Internet connectivity solution (that doesn't involve geosynchronous satellites) to rural areas, I know of at least two clients (my parents) who would not only be *very* interested in signing a contract, but who would probably put whichever company gets there first on their holiday-card list.
For rural business locations, there's a big gap between a T1 (very expensive) and dial-up or satellite (both slow in different ways). This would make 95% of their IT issues disappear overnight. (It's amazing how many 'Net apps really don't like ping times in excess of 1000ms.)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
From what I've been reading, WiMax has really good potential. Mobile WiMax (dunno how far its been standardized) ought to do fancy roaming thingies like the mobile counterparts. With far greater range than WiFi, its pretty useful for rural areas in some countries as well.
The more options we have for mobile and data services, the better it is for us consumers.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Of interest (not trying to spread FUD), one of the board of directors was the man responsible for promising Baystar that Microsoft was going to invest in SCO. This was reported on GROKLAW ever so recently when people were wondering where to find this guy (forget his name... something like Davidson). Not that I expect there to be a Clearwire/Microsoft/Baystar/SCO link but thought others might find it interesting so just wanted to post it. I live in Seattle and dumped Speakeasy ever so recently and when I found this out, it was definitely left a lingering bad taste in my mouth that made me second guess my decision. As for the service, the download speeds are great, upload speeds suck. Good if you are just Joe Average surfer but bad if you are a web developer. Also, check for cellphone towers and other things like that in your vicinity as they will cause interference.
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Granted, we've made a ton of progress in wireless over the last several years to the point where just about everyone has or has access to a wireless connection. That's great ... but this true "broadband" experience is going to require a huge amount of spectrum as more subscribers log on, or a huge number of cells in order to provide the experience.
... it'll certainly make FTTH much more competitive and will perhaps drive telcos and cablecos to step up their rollouts. Rural areas without a broadband infrastructure seem to be the most likely to benefit from this WiMax phenomenon.
The article mentions the 2.5 GHz specturm. It isn't all that much different than the 2.4 we know and love today, except that the spectrum is licensed. A lot of the other transmission pitfalls will likely remain (Line-of-Sight, etc.)
Two factors are that spectrum is inherently limited, and the higher the frequency, the more power is required to transmit over a given distance. There is already sufficient suspicion that cellular transmissions aren't good for you. I can't imagine WiMax is going to fare much better here, but that has yet to be seen.
While I don't ever care to get WiMax
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
The reason why they're pushing WiMax is they can charge us more for that than they can for free Wifi, and it's all about the greenbacks, not the tech.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Could this be the new backbone of the mobile effort?
God I hope so, we all know how pitiful the state of broadband is in the US...DSL is cramped(it's a twisted pair of two copper wires) and the cable companies are acting like the greedy pigs they are(expensive, anti-upstream, abusive).
The consumer is desperate for an alternative. Without competition we might as well be living in Communist Russia. Just look at AMD vs. Intel, or nVidia vs. ATI....that is how innovation happens.
This is something we've been waiting for for far too long. Broadband is probably the single-most important innovation of the last 10 years, and it's also one of the most stagnant(especially in the US). We desperately need a new competitor in this market.
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My patented 'Wombat Wimax Relay Backpacks' will take care of this problem and our 'Wombat Relocation Program'(TM) will insure there are plenty of Wombats for the other six continents. We are still working on getting them to come out during daylight hours but our patented 'Ultra Female Wombat Estrus Scent' is showing great promise.
Rogers and Bell in Canada have WiMAX services using OFDM Non-Line-of-Sight NLOS wireless service. The modem is a (RSU-2510-FV) NextNet Expedience Broadband Wireless Modem which you have to rent (can't find anywhere to buy one) from either carrier. I've tried it and it works well.
The reason why this *MAY* pan out for these companies is that even in major urban areas in Canada, you have problems getting xDSL because you're too far away from a CO and they haven't dropped a RDSLAM in your subdivision. However, the above services are available up to 5KM or so in any direction from a broadcast tower. I also suspect it's cheaper for telcos to deploy, plus they get the revenue from the modem rental.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I've seen Clearwire offers in my area, but I didn't realize that they were WiMax. Are they any good?
Let's hope it gives them the royal screwing they deserve for their damn anti-neutrality schemes too. I PAY for a certain download speed, and I expect to get as close to that speed as content providers' servers can deliver.
Maybe we can hunt them, like we used to hunt the Wumpus in the past.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I manage network operations for a large ISP in northern Canada and we use the same technology as Clearwire (not WiMAX - it is sort of a proto-WiMAX) for providing high speed Internet service. This technology is non-line-of-sight. I am not talking pseudo, I am talking the full meal deal. The technology actually depends on multipath reflection off of various surfaces, and this is what allows it to be NLOS. The fact that the frequency used is licensed means that they can be given additional power, which enhances signal reflectivity, and NLOS reception.
We are in a fairly large city in northern Canada, and there is nowhere in town we fail to receive a signal, from a fairly small number of cells located around town. As an old-school dial-up ISP without access to cable or copper infrastructure, NLOS high speed wireless was our holy grail, and this technology delivered. The stuff is black magic, it is something to behold.
From the demo unit we got from Clearwire, it was clear (ahem) that everything besides port 80 was severely throttled down. Web surfing? Fine. IMAP, SFTP, etc.? Too bad, can't.
There is already sufficient suspicion that cellular transmissions aren't good for you.
I'd aggree if you said sufficient hysteria, but I don't think anyone has shown that it causes any real injury. There was a major Dutch (IIRC anyway) study released last month that found no such injury.
...is what happens during a nice, juicy rain or thunderstorm? Eh?
"Could this be the new backbone of the mobile effort?"
No.
This has been another installment of Snappy Answers to Slashdot Questions.
I'm already on WiMAX with Rogers in Toronto for the last 3 months (disclaimer: I don't work for Rogers and lately I've been starting to hate their guts [bad customer service, nothing to do with WiMAX]).
They market it as Internet Portable and it covers the entire city + some of the Greater Toronto Area. Basically, all you need is a power outlet to power the modem and there, you have internet access. I'm fortunate to live in a house pretty tall, so even though I'm in a valley, I can still get full reception.
The data rate isn't too bad (1.5 Mbps) considering I used to use their High Speed Light at 1 Mbps. It cost me around CAD$40 a month (about US$30) for unlimited access. My only grip is their DHCP server doesn't assign me a hostname, just an IP, which, of course, is dynamic.
Otherwise, it's great. When I moved from my old place to this one, I didn't need to reactivate my internet as all I had to do is unplug the device from the old place and replug it as home. I didn't have telephone or cable setup and yet I already had internet.
Another advantage is that since it's on a licensed band, there are almost no interferences and it comes with builtin encryption.
AC
The article mentions the 2.5 GHz specturm. It isn't all that much different than the 2.4 we know and love today, except that the spectrum is licensed.
Yah, but with a license it's likely that devices and access points can transmit at higher powers. That can provide either higher bits/second, or longer distances. Also, does the WiMax standard provide for a larger spectrum allocation than the WiFi does? I don't know, but if it does that would certainly be a boost to available bandwidth.
There is already sufficient suspicion that cellular transmissions aren't good for you. I can't imagine WiMax is going to fare much better here, but that has yet to be seen.
In fact it's exactly the opposite. There's a lot of evidence that cellular transmissions have no harmful effect at all. There was at least one study done in Finland that was discussed on Slashdot not long ago.
AccountKiller
As the subject line points out, I am a subscriber of Clearwire. Right now, they are not broadcasting "WiMAX" in my market. Portland Oregon is the only market they are broadcasting "True WiMAX". Everywhere else it's a pre-standard roll out. The only major difference is that in pre-WiMAX, there is no protocol for handing off from one tower to another. With the WiMAX standard, the hand-off is guaranteed to function seamlessly while you are traveling 60 MPH. In demonstrations, they have been able to show that it works up on to the 100's of MPH. (On Japanese bullet trains.) So, I've been using it for the past two months, and I feel I am in a good place to describe the level of service. Setup: I actually had an account representative come out to my house to check signal strength, and help me set up the service. In reality, the service is ready to go out of the box. You literally plug the modem into a power outlet, and into your router / computer, and everything sets up automatically. When you buy the service in the store, you fill in your details right there, so by the time you get your modem home, the service is all ready to go. Speed: I opted for the 1.5 mbps service, and frankly, I feel it is faster than my Crap-cast cable service, even though they advertise "UP TO 12mbps.) With Clearwire, they advertise 1.5, and you get 1.5, period. There is very low latency in the system. Service: When I signed up, I was given 3 ways to contact Clearwire. The 800 number, through the website, and the cellphone number of my account rep. If I need anything, he takes care of me. The reliability is awesome. I'm in Seattle, and if any of you saw the news reports, we had a massive windstorm last week. 100 MPH gusts, and thousands of people are still without power. My Clearwire connection never dropped. A lot of cable subscribers are still out... Other than that, I only experienced 1 service outage, that lasted for 15 mins. Portability: This is both good and bad. If I want to drag the modem around with me (7 inches tall, 5 inches wide, and 1 inch thick) I can use the service all over the area. Newer versions are supposed to be PC card size, but I'm not really sure that I want to have a 4 watt transmitter sitting right next to my tadpoles. I love the service, and I just hope that they are able to continue providing the level of service that I have come to expect.
WiMax is regulated spectrum. IE: the FCC will not allow the average consumer to buy equipment to build towers.
It's intended use is more as competition to both local DSL/Cable bandwidth providers, as well as competition for Cell networks.
If whoever owns the spectrum rights for WiMax (like NextWave) decides to offer a reasonable mobile data service over WiMax then it will force Verizon et al to bring their prices down.
Also, VoIP over WiMax could provide a compelling voice platform for competing with cell networks.
I have been eagerly waiting for WiMAX to come out for some time now; I think that this technology would be revolutionary to even the typical Joe RAZR.
As one poster already mentioned, wireless internet can be costly (even though some cellular companies are driving this down; last time I checked, T-Mobile has the full package for $20 a month). WiMAX would make revolutionary inroads to mobile connectivity, as well as better mobile devices in the long run. I think that if this technology flourishes, we should expect to see full PDA-like cell phones coming out and being used by almost everyone. That means that we would have more choice for real work being done on our phones rather than to have to get a Treo or a clumsy Windows-Mobile device as our options.
Also, this would be great for Skype and its users, since we would be able to talk on our phones while paying for internet, which is a lot more worthwhile than paying for lots of minutes that may not be used.
It'd be nice to have, say, 1900-2400mhz available as a common wireless spectrum usable for phones, data, whatever. As you point out, there are physical limitations and opening yet another narrow spectrum entry, filling it with providers who oversell capacity only invites a lather, rinse, repeat cycle of more spectrum, more overselling.
Worse is the mobile devices which are either made deliberately hardware incompatible or take a long time to become available in multiband configurations. It would be nice to have a single band which would make devices more portable (barring encoding differences) and make the radio costs cheaper through fewer designs and less complexity.
Why did I choose them? Cost really, I don't need a raging net connection and this was $10/less per month than any other solutions as I don't have a phone or cable line to bundle with for the big providers. Also they do offer the magic of accessing their network from anywhere in their range, which I haven't tried yet, but ideally I can access it in the mall, on the outskirts of town, or another city where they have service (a very wonderful thing). Unfortunately it involves carrying around their modem, which is the size of a modem, and not that practical for everyday use.
Thunderstorms are fine! Weather has been hell in Seattle for the last month, and aside from losing power due to a windstorm I've held my connection through rain, wind, snow, no noticeable decline in connection speed.
While I would like the available speeds to be higher I've been pretty happy, even if they're making a good profit on it I'm still saving money compared to a land-based solution.
--Captain Karikas of http://www.piratejokes.net/
TFA is a bit vague, but I believe the business plan of these companies works as follows:
1) Raise a bunch of investor capital (done)
2) Use the capital to buy out the WiMax spectrum at auction (done)
3) Raise more money with an IPO
4) Use the IPO money to build a residential/business broadband service
At this point they're competing with DSL and cable providers, but not cell networks because the coverage is still spotty. Of course, coverage doesn't matter much for residential service since your house isn't really moving. After they get a good amount of subscribers, then they can:
5) Build out their coverage enough to compete with the Cell networks.
There was a recent article in IEEE Spectrum that the reason companies are pushing WiMax instead of Wifi is that the spectrum is licensed -- its not free like wifi. Sorry I can't find a link. So we can't just buy WiMax access points and transmit. Its controlled by the companies who hold the license.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX#Deployment
Look near the bottom for the companies who hold the license for each country.
The article goes on to say that there is nothing special about WiMax that allows it much further coverage than wifi. Wifi could do the same thing, but then companies can't make money off of it.
Japan has 100mbps synchronous connections but yet I have to suffer through Comcast commercials telling me that 6mbps is "blazingly fast" (and we cap uloads at 768k btw)...
This is, honestly, bullshit.. the telecom and cable companies don't want to offer real services that compete globally.. they want to nickel and dime us for every megabit.. i can't wait for ANY type of competition.
My first question: Do these companies that are (IPO'ing and) betting on WiMax have good business models? Would they be a good bet for my own bet on WiMax?
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Wow. What a lot of unnecessarily negative comments to make. I say that because it's not like there's anything that strings them together except that they're negative. 2.5GHz requires more power! Sufficient suspicion that cellular transmissions aren't good for you! This'll require a "huge" amount of spectrum!
Let's deal with them one by one:
1. 2.5GHz isn't ideal, but it's fine for NLOS, almost as good as regular PCS (think about it, it's only 25% higher in frequency.) For Line-of-Sight, it's no problem at all, as the antenna you're using would be external anyway. Frequencies in the 3.5GHz are already being used for that.
2. The phrase "sufficient suspicion" has to be one of the most misleading, anti-scientific, phrases I've heard since "Intelligent design". It's taking the valid phhrase "sufficient evidence" (which would indeed be worrying, but that doesn't exist) and replacing the word "evidence" with "suspicion" because there isn't any evidence. It's intellectually dishonest.
3. There is a huge amount of spectrum being licensed, and it's getting bigger every few years. In addition to cellular and PCS, we've just had the AWS spectrum in the US, and the 2.5GHz range is being made available. Other frequency bands are also coming online. In addition to more efficient protocols by WISPS (including modern 3G cellphone carriers, do not forget about them), operators of cellular networks of all descriptions (AMPS/CDMA2000, GSM/UMTS, WiMAX, UMTS-TDD, etc) are putting up more and more towers, breaking up the available area into smaller and smaller areas.
The UMTS LTE project is expecting to finalise new UMTS air interface protocols based on OFDMA and MIMO that'll increase the downlink to about 100Mbps per tower per 20MHz of spectrum, by the end of 2007. It's not hard to see with microcellular coverage in cities and lower population density outside of cities coupled with towers often as little as two or three miles apart, that's a lot of capacity for a single carrier to have.
Will it keep up with wireline? Probably not, but most of us are happy with our 1.5Mbps DSL connections right now...
I think WiMAX, and the technologies that compete against it (UMTS-TDD, for instance) have a very promising future. Right now, the biggest hurdle is getting people to pull their fingers out in getting the technology up, and getting the infrastructure installed. Is it a Utopia? No, nothing ever is. Do the limits of the electromagnetic spectrum have any serious risk of derailing this? Not a chance.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
What about the children?http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?s id=06/11/25/013213
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I'm no expert, but there is another shortcoming in WiMAX. The college I went to did a mini-pilot for WiMAX on campus, but ran into a big problem with it. The WiMAX signal couldn't penetrate the walls of some of the very old stone buildings that are all over campus. In order for WiMAX to work, they would need some kind of hybrid infrastructure of WiMAX and traditional WiFi so that a wireless internet connection could be picked up from any building on campus. I'm not sure if this problem has really been addressed by the WiMAX powers that be. This could pose a big problem for older cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston, where most of the city is made up of old stone buildings.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
We have allready wireless last mile access using 3G networks like UMTS, the service i currently use supports till 3.6Mbit which is really similar to a entry level DSL line, but this is not going to be comparable to DSL services in town for a lot of reasons.
First of all is "mobile", and telco's are used to make the user pay for this "extra" feature, and, it's unstable, latency is greater than cable and latency/jitter is the real user percerption of speed when surfing with a browser or using voip.
So, really, don't know, i think WiMax will be great were no other connectivity alternative is possible, but, in big cities, cabling will be the best solution for a long long time.
I wish I could be betting on fiber some time soon.....
I fear the Y2038 bug
> It isn't all that much different than the 2.4 we know and love today, except that the spectrum is licensed. A lot of the other transmission pitfalls
> will likely remain (Line-of-Sight, etc.)
The major difference is that the output power levels at 2.4 GHz is significantly limited. The power is limited to 30 dBm (1W) for 2.4 GHz, but there is no such limitation at 2.5 GHz (since it's licensed spectrum), so a single base station can put out 1500 W (EiRP), like what you see with 3G mobile technologies.
Combined with smart antennas, the range will be much greater, and you can engineer the network to support non line of sight and pure mobility. At 2.5 GHz with 16e WiMAX, you should see the same distances as with 3G mobile at 1.9 GHz.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
I am an Australian currently in Brussels, Belgium for a little while. When I wwas looking for internet connection options, Clearwire was really the only choice. I don't want/have a landline, just a mobile phone. The only other option was DSL. So apparently it can take up to 3 weeks to get the telephone company here to hook you up with a line, then I have to pay monthly line rental, then it can take another 2 to 3 weeks to get the DSL connected.
or
I walked into the local Clearwire store, paid the connection fee (comes with free use of a modem which gets returned once your contract is up), brought it home, and was online an hour later. Sure I have roughly half the monthly download limit of a DSL connection for the same price, but I'd rather that than wait up to 6 weeks for the internet. I am happy so far.
What's to keep people from simply connecting to each other with this technology and eventually growing into one monsterous spaghetti tangle of an end-user driven wireless internet? It would seem to cut out the commercial overlords as well as intrusive goverment oversight and regulation. Did 'they' screw up and let the cat out of the bag on this one, thus enabling a free for all, unregulated new internet to emerge? A quick perusal of some equipment vendors shows that at least some products are available in the license free range and the fact that they offer services such as "intracell blocking" to keep subscribers from directly connecting to eachother suggests that the ability to do so is actually a built in 'feature'. This has a lot of possibilities. I wonder if they were short sighted to the possibilities of losing control over this medium or just betting that the masses would be too stupid to make use of it in such guerilla style tactic.
The current "limits" are mostly because we make extremely poor use of wireless transmissions. Devices have no good way of weeding out signals not for them, so the only option is to limit interference. As phased array antennas and other techniques become more common, we can make much better use of the spectrum. Low power, wide band, directional transmissions, with fine meshes will allow the network to scale to *huge* amounts of bandwidth.
The limits are practical limits, and they will improve as our technology improves. What needs to be done, is to slowly wrest the licensed spectrum (which is essentially wasted) from the broadcast corporations, and give it to the people.
I work with SkyPilot Networks (www.skypilot.com) hardware and have a wireless mesh network set up with 30+ nodes that I am managing. I was getting 5.8Mbps of throughput even when I was a couple of hops away from the gateway according to iperf! That's not bad at all! I think that all of this WiMAX stuff is very exciting, and I even wrote a short paper concerning future development which can be found at http://www.duke.edu/~jyw2/spectrum.html
"If you aren't living on the edge, then you're taking too up much room"
What company's products are you using?
I've seen penty of companies promising this sort of thing, but in the frequency we're using we're fairly limited as to distance (NLOS is a relaity only within 1 km of base station). ETSI says 1 watt max, we use 1 watt. If we could do 10 watts, I'd imagine we'd see something more interesting (it would be nice)..
You're using the 2.5 ghz frequency, right?
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
HSPDA: 1.8 Mbit/s or 3.6 Mbit/s in downlink. Further steps to 14.4 Mbit/s 3G: 384kbps for mobile systems and 2Mbps for stationary WiBro: 30 to 50 Mbit/s and cover a radius of 1-5 km WiMax Fixed 802.16d: 10Mbps (10km rural, 2km Urban). Several more to boot. Interesting.
PreacherTom is an astroturfer for BusinessWeek magazine. Look at the URL in this recent Slashdot story and notice the campaign_id string. Now look at his user page. Scroll down to the submissions section. Notice how almost every one is a link to a BusinessWeek.com article containing the campaign_id string. Now look at the search results for "campaign_id preachertom". He's been pulling this shit on slashdot, digg, Fark, MetaFilter, and who knows where else. Check out this MetaTalk thread for the initial discovery.
Same as Clearwire, we are using the Motorola (Formerly NextNet) Expedience OFDM system. http://www.nextnetwireless.com/products.asp