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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.'"
Wi Not?
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!
LTE is still far into the future. We are currently testing LTE in some sites here in Sweden and it's quite expensive. Plus we need more terminals with the LTE chip before this will be a breakthrough among the population. My guess is that here in Sweden we will have a bad/ok LTE connection around 2015, and around 2017 ïwe will have about as much as 90ï-95% of Sweden covered with LTE. Where as in USA which is a bit larger I don't think you'll have okish LTE connectivity until 2020. But these are just number I pulled out from a dark place and guesses from when I worked at TeliaSonera (Swedens largest mobile access provider) with different projects like Telia Homerun (wifi in public places) and UMTS. Wimax is a good solution until then, if it's rolled out within 2-3 years.
In my country recently, a company launched Wimax internet,I tried it.
For the first few days, I was receiving my full bandwidth and was very happy.
Then for the next months, I almost threw the Wimax modem out of the window and was also having some suicidal tendencies...
(I think you must have understood what the gravity of the situation was)
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.
Research the technologies, it takes about 20 minutes, and you'll see that LTE and WiMax are nearly identical. Basically WiMax and LTE have different optimization strategies, but they operate on the same band ranges, the same equipment, etc. In nearly all cases, a firmware update could make a WiMax radio into an LTE radio.
As it is, WiMax is best suited for non-moving targets, or, alternatively, short range cells that would best suit a city with skyscrapers. It's not a big difference but it's there.
Anyway, clearwire has already made it ... clear... that they could switch to LTE if needed with minimal impact financially or technically, and minor research supports that claim.
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
The old adage applies: if someone claims they can predict the future, chances are they are trying to sell you something.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
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!
he's clearly never heard of latency or the reliability issues of wireless. then again, he has managed to whore his crap on /. so he can't be all stupid...
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
I own an ISP (www.kos.net) which does rural broadband, and we've been very successful at that. Sometimes performance isn't what people expect, but that's to be expected... just not by those people who want unlimited fibre to their cottage. ;)
WiMax has been shouted from mountaintop to mountaintop for the past six years. And it isn't really being deployed much. Why?
Let me tell you.
First of all, WiMax has a range of 10 miles. That's not so bad but in rural installations, it's just barely enough.
Secondly in many places, WiMax has a max emitted power of 43dbm. In others it has up to 58dbm. Either way, it's not that much power. Further, the wattage is about 15 watts for the CPE equipment and about 200 watts for the base station - but the base station cannot emit 200 watts to a single transmitter by law, so that's just a red herring unless you plan to build out a base station with multiple antennas (good idea for the first build). Many (Redline, Alvarion, Aperto) use 2.3 watts.
Third, line of sight is a major requirement for WiMax. 802.16d or 802.16e. It is possible to get some non line of sight connections at close range (2 miles) if the conditions are right, but in the end it's a high speed wave (2.3Ghz for the Clearwire + Inukshuk early adopters, 3.4-3.7Ghz for the later adopters like my company). High speed waves have a much higher chance of hitting a particle and stopping than lower speed waves. 400Mhz used for voice and cell data has a much better NLoS capability and 900Mhz radios we use for rural broadband are also quite good, especially at low power levels they are allowed. WiMax does, however, have pretty good NEAR line of sight capabilities, we're finding.
Fourth, WiMax standards aren't. Rarely will one device interoperate with another vendor's equipment. So those WiMax chips in your Intel laptop? Junk.
Fifth, performance of WiMax isn't as good as 5.8Ghz access points. That's right. WiMax uses a 5, 7 or 10Mhz channel and while 10Mhz has slightly better throughput, you're not going to see much of that because of antenna spacing and distance characteristics. It's "54Mbps" rating per base antenna ($5,000 U.S. per + antenna) works out to 23Mbps aggregate at a 50% RX/TX spacing, which means 10.5Mbps in either direction.... although some companies are talking about a 75TX/25RX percentage split in upcoming firmware. In any case, it's not a panacea, and yes that bandwidth is shared between up to 200 people per base station.
Sixth, WiMax gear is really expensive. Everything about it is expensive, from base stations to subscriber modules, to tower placement, to purchasing licenses for transmitting.
Seventh, because it's licensed and it is a high-speed wave, it's mostly useless except to rural customers. Not to mention that nobody wants 15 watts of emitted power on their crotch.
Eigth, you will need to register your transmitter with Industry Canada or the FCC in the States. Maybe both. Not only is this fairly complex to do unless you're a service provider, you may find yourself having to bid on spectrum or with the 3.65Ghz band, you may be told that another transmitter is too near to you and you'll have to coordinate with that operator.
So. That's WiMax. It's not much good to most people, it has limited abilities to provide rural service (only better than 2.4Ghz WiFi because it's got more output power and has a licensed clean channel), it's really expensive, it's not fast enough and it's got complex licensing.
Why are we using it? We are desperately in need of another frequency, since we have filled many of our 900Mhz radios and the 5.8Ghz radios are not good for rural use at all (no near or non line of sight ability). 2.4Ghz is a dirty frequency with a lot of operators and power-company "smart meters" in it (that's a stupidity of a whole other level that needs a whole other discussion). So, it's WiMax.
BTW, those thinking city-wide WiFi is cool should do a little study on why it's not workable. I
...Steve
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Which is why if we are ever gonna get nationwide broadband we are gonna HAVE to confiscate the last mile. There is simply no other choice. My mother has been 2 blocks short of cable since the house was built 29 years ago. Guess how far away she is now? Can you say "two blocks" because they and the DSL got together ages ago and decided to only "cherry pick" and refuse to serve anyone else? i think you can.
In the past dozen years I have seen no less than three different startups try to service the area, only to get run out on a rail by the combined might of the teleco/cableco duopoloy. The latest is a WISP, which I predict will be dead by spring. You see the backbone provider, which also happens to be the one that offers the substandard 19k dialup(yes that is no typo, you are lucky if you reach 33k on a good day) squeezes them on the price of backbone access until they simply can't offer their service at a price anyone can afford to pay.
I was told by a friend of mine who ran a startup in the area that they squeezed out that upon consulting a lawyer he was told expect the price of suing them to run close to 1 million dollars, and expect it to take a decade or more to wind through the courts, so he just shut up shop and moved away. The WISP, which started out at unlimited 1Mb for $50 and thanks to being squeezed is now only able to offer download limited 733k for $150, won't survive much longer.
So pretty much the ONLY way we are gonna get nationwide broadband is to kill the duopoly by seizing the last mile. We paid them billions in tax breaks to run lines they didn't bother to, so we have the reason to seize right there. We should give them 90 days to pay back every red cent with interest, or take the whole damned thing. if they want a monopoly? Run lines to those houses that have no broadband now and we'll give you x number of years as a monopoly with them. Double if you run fiber. If we don't do this then I have no doubt they will simply continue to "cherry pick" while everybody else gets to deal with oversold lines that continue to degrade as they aren't even spending money on maintaining the lines anymore. They are just too busy shoveling money into their pockets to give a shit.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.