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Companies Betting on WiMAX

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the takin-it-to-the-max dept.

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?"

1 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The electromagnetic spectrum has limits, people by hibachi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.