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Australian WiMax Pioneer Calls It a Disaster
Anonymous Coward writes "Garth Freeman, CEO of Australia's first WiMax operator, sat down at the recent International WiMax Conference in Bangkok and unleashed a tirade about the failings of the technology, leaving an otherwise pro-WiMax audience stunned. His company, Buzz Broadband, had deployed a WiMax network over a year ago, and Freeman left no doubt about what conclusions he had drawn. He claimed that 'its non-line of sight performance was "non-existent" beyond just 2 kilometres from the base station, indoor performance decayed at just 400m and that latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP, which Buzz has employed as the main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent services.' We've previously discussed the beginnings of WiMax as well as recent plans for a massive network in India.
Stations of relatively modest power can provide services to distances of about 100 miles.
Receivers are cheap, portable and ubiquitous.
The AM radio is as accessible and familiar to the four year old as it is to the centenarian.
In event of natural disaster, I'd rather have an AM radio than VoIP.
AM radio is a really durable technology. You can listen to solar powered broadcasts on crank powered radios.
the cost of building and maintaining 10,000 access points will be what. exactly?
Less than the cost of laying fiber to millions of homes.
Add to that the fact that AM radio is robust, understood and ubiquitous technology. The shit could it the fan tomorrow. Major economic collapse, dying infrastructure or whatever. AM radio would still be around and working. There is something to be said for a civilization having enough depth and legacy in its technology that there become no single point of failure.
Myopic thinking. The value and the income from those access points will be a fraction of what can be carried over fibre. Namely voice, data, video, emergency services, business services like remote backup, et al.
But forget that, it's the least of your worries. Your real problem will be to make the access points and subscribers not all hear each other in the limited frequency available, drowning each other out, causing network brownouts (or blackouts), hurting efficiency, causing lag and re-registrations, etc. Go downtown Toronto and you'll see what I mean. It just doesn't work the way people want it to.
...Steve
Not really. Small meshes are easier to get working than large ones, so the first step in deployment is to dangle meshes off the ends of existing infrastructure. You'll find a static access point in, for example, a coffee shop, and then use a small mesh to extend the range out into the street by relaying via devices in there. Once enough people are carrying mesh-capable devices, you'll be able to extend the range all the way to (for example) the access point in the library. At the point, any computer in the mesh can have some of its traffic routed via either connection. Once enough meshes are deployed and overlapping then the existing static links are just for bulk traffic or fallback use. The problem is that the complexity of mesh routing does not scale well. If you've solved the routing problem, you can deploy easily. Until then, meshes are limited to small-scale use.
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