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WiMax In 2010 — Too Little, Too Late?
CWmike writes "By the end of 2010, users in more than 80 US cities may be able to ditch their cable modems, T1 setups and DSL lines — and the Wi-Fi routers that go with them — in favor of WiMax wireless technology. Wait, haven't we heard that before? WiMax has been promised 'any day now' for years, but WiMax vendors such as Clearwire Communications LLC have suffered numerous delays in rolling out services. A recent ramp-up in Clearwire deployments bodes well for WiMax, but it may not have the chance to fully get off the ground before a competing technology called Long-Term Evolution (LTE) does it in. Craig Mathias, principal analyst at Farpoint Group and a Computerworld columnist, sees WiMax taking a minority stake in the wireless broadband future. 'LTE will eventually be a combined broadband voice/data solution that can do everything that WiMax can and more,' he said. Mathias believes that LTE could get up to 80% of the global market share in future cellular installations. 'This leaves WiMax with a potential market share that cannot exceed 20% — but that's still a huge number, assuming 4 billion users around 2020 or so," he said. 'You do the math. The opportunity is nothing to sneeze at.'"
Who would want to ditch a perfectly good DSL line, for a slow, unstable and laggy wireless?
Wimax is probably great for people on the move, but I just don't see it replacing my 10/10mbit line.
Wow, getting rich is easy! After analysis, I believe my unproven product will get 80% market share. I'll just wait for the cash to start rolling in now. I feel bad for all my competitors wasting their time!
It's the old "telco" vs. "Internet" battle.
"telco" solutions are generally full featured, "heavy" solutions. "Internet" solutions are lighter weight, easier to implement, "good enough" and often succeed by stealing all the low hanging fruit.
LTE is from the telco camp (it's the successor to 3G mobile phone standards). WiMax is from the Internet camp. My guess is that WiMax is a little too light weight, and so not up to the task of forming a seamless network, hence the reason why it is late to market. By being late to market, WiMax has lost it's "fast mover" "Internet" advantage, has lost the chance to build mind share by getting the low hanging fruit, and is about to get creamed by the fuller featured LTE.
Where as in USA which is a bit larger I don't think you'll have okish LTE connectivity until 2020.
More like 2050. We do not even have decent 3G outside the highly populated areas by 4-5 miles. There are even areas that do not even have edge or gprs near me (and plenty that have no cellular coverage to even make a call).
Unfortunately - the physics doesn't let you do 'free wireless broadband for everyone'.
Radio waves travel until they hit something.
To make an analogy.
You're at a sports event in a large stadium.
You can talk to your neighbour just fine, if everyone is also talking to their neighbour, however you can't be heard by someone 5 seats away though they might hear just fine if everyone was quiet for a moment.
But if everyone raises their voice to the level that they can be heard 5 seats away - the background noise level goes way up, and you can only be heard next to you.
Pretty soon everyones screaming, but can still only be heard by those next to you.
All cellphones work well becasue they very carefully schedule who gets to talk at what time.
If you could arrange it so that everyone was silent, you can easily speak to someone 5 seats away without raising your voice.
To back away from the analogy - because there is less background noise as the cellphone networks arrange their connected devices not to interfere with each other, the handset needs much less power to talk to the phone tower, and gets much better battery life and range.
Mesh networks unfortunately don't fix this either.
You can do collision avoidance for the few closest nodes to you, but pretty soon you can't hear the individual signals, and you simply see them as a background murmer - which sharply reduces the range at which you can talk to nearby nodes.
Add to this the problem that if you have a mesh where every connection does 50 hops to talk to someone - each node has only 2% of its bandwidth left for itself.
Wimax is what ISDN happen to be in 90's
assuming 4 billion users
Can I have some of what that guy's smoking? There is hardly even 4 billion electricity users, let alone 4 billion literate people.
You just got troll'd!
They(Sprint/Clearwire) have been trying to push Wimax for 4g mobile networks forever now and a lot of dummies have bought into it. LTE is going to be the 4g wireless standard. About the only thing Wimax is good for is last mile fixed position connectivity. Which is probably not a bad niche to service. But even Clearwire just said recently that they could easily flip to LTE with just a software push, so even they are hedging their bets.
So many injustices..so little time..
Is that really a common WiMax experience?
I've had ClearWire for about two years now, and have gotten a reliable 1.5Mbps/256kbps connection with no hiccups. Now they have converted me over to a 5Mbps/500kbps connection for the same price (although I seem to be getting around 2.5Mbps instead of 5). I've never had the problems you are complaining about.
It's true that the underlying technologies behind LTE and WiMax are nearly identical. However, the telecommunications sector has shown over and over that politics/regulation play a more important role than technology. The main advantage brought forward by WiMax is that it is designed as a full IP solutions. Providers only sell the bandwidth (much like DSL), which is of interest to the final consumer since he make use of any internet application (voip, video conference, gaming, ..). This goes much against the traditional business model of mobile operator in the US.
So, even if LTE, make it by 2010 (which I hugely doubt). It will likely be tied to an overpriced features business model (sms, voicemail, called id, etc)
Note that not all GSM users are distinct people. In places like Japan there are more mobile phones than people, in lots of first-world countries it's common for people to have a work phone and a home phone. A lot of embedded devices, like irrigation systems, are now coming with GSM support for sending data home, rather than requiring being cabled in. Lots of laptops are now coming with HSPA hardware, which uses a separate SIM (and, therefore, counts as a different user) to the owner's mobile phone. 4 billion GSM users may only be 1.5 billion people.
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Wired networks used to use a sort of timeslot based system, we called it token ring. Then we discovered that collision detection and backoff could work better and have no central authority. We call it Ethernet.
Agreed, it does require that people not tweek their hardware to cheat, but that can be managed even with open drivers. You just make the hardware have no knob to defeat collision detection or adjust the backoff. There won't be very many people shaving the carrier off and shooting the silicon with a laser to make adjustments.
Current Ethernet products meet those requirements already in a chip that costs <$10.
Part of the problem is that WiFi is limited to a teensy little sliver of spectrum that nobody else wanted because microwave ovens radiate there and water absorbs it.. WiFi gets to share it with baby monitors and cordless phones. The rest is "owned" by the same people who want to charge you by the bit and sell their services based on "all the things you can do" while whining that their customers keep trying to do too much stuff (that is, they actually use it the way it was advertised). With 3 whole non-overlapping channels to work with, it's not possible to lay out a proper cell structure.