Actually, Microsoft's localization is pretty good compared to some of the FOSS projects I've seen, not that it excuses Microsoft for other bad behavior. And no country must use Windows in English unless they really want to. There are good and viable choices other than Windows for all but the most obscure languages. See the planetlimux.org site for one interesting adaptation in municipal government as an example.
Why yes, I've heard of WPA2 and other key structures.
Show me where muni-wifi deployments use it.
Then show me where 802.11i is deployed.
Then show me how many people have updated their client software to support one, or the other.
Then I'll show you the list of failures, the list of plans put on hold, and the plans of many different consortiums that have fallen completely in the ditch.
Cells aren't deployed in dense/sparse models. They're most often unsecured. The entire spectra used has natively awful dispersion characteristics.
Add in business models that don't support/sustain these lofty goals, and it's a mess, and logically, Google and Earthlink, among others, have bailed.
This is a LAN technology, not MAN. Sure, there are guys doing 802.11a and.16 uplinks. Some actually support symmetrical backhaul. Only a few vendors do the real work needed, from finding poles, to doing good diligence in making sure that coverage is realistic given many, many obstacles. Fewer still deploy a realistic AES-based security model. Fewer still know the difference between a session handoff and a live handgrenade.
You likely work for a vendor. Maybe your organization does the right job. Maybe you've found a sustainable long term asset and support management model. Maybe you live in this universe.
Although we'll agree that politicians are in the bag of telcos, there are real and factual difficulties with muni-WiFi
1) bad cellular support grid (3 non-interfering channels, making coverage very difficult) 2) competition with other wireless, paid services (UMTS, EVDO, etc) 3) competition from commercial 'hotspot' providers (hotels, paid-hotspots, etc.) 4) poor business models that caved Google, Earthlink, and others 5) the silliness of using a LAN technology (look at the specs as mentioned up-thread) for a MAN/WAN purpose, as the CSMA/CA technology plainly sucks for services that require mulitple concurrent low-latency streams from a single AP) 6) non-existent subnet handoff (all solutions are proprietary, so far), and lack of VLAN wizardry 7) super-dumb security-- as in NONE as there are no encryption schemes, poor to no authentication (too expensive) and no session controls
Plainly, muni-Wifi is a great idea, if WiFi itself worked, and if there were business models to sustain its deployment. It's a misapplication of the technology, politicians aside. We're just not there yet in terms of building meshes that provide excellent or in many cases, just minimally usable coverage.
I understand the unceasing need for some to communicate. They never shutup, some.
Doing so while in the toilet is another problem altogether. It's just plainly nasty.
Worse, some people will drive a 5-speed, smoke, have a cup of coffee in one hand, and their phone pinned between shoulder and ear, trying to make a dicey high-speed orange light left turn.
For these, an alteration of the aphorism, 'God looks after drunks and little old ladies' needs an appendage.
Oh- what's that sound? It's just my urine splashing against the bowl. Have you not the most basic of manners?
That weird balloonish-noise? The fellow next to me just cut one, could you repeat that again; no, wait, it's the sound of a flush.
Good heavens, man.
There are a few things you don't do in the toilet. One of this is to not eat or drink something. Lots of germs around, not to mention the scents. Another is to hold your dingus in one hand, whilst talking on the phone with someone. Not sanitary or even polite by any stretch of the imagination.
Downtime? Egads-- are you that time pressured??? This isn't efficiency we're talking about, it's very basic manners and decorum. It has nothing to do with conservatism or liberalism-- it's manners! Ask any female or the next three random people you meet, if it's ok to talk on the phone whilst piddling at a urinal. Stand back first. You'll be surprised, I'm guessing.
I watched one guy dump his phone into the urinal. He had to move the deodorant and guard to fetch it. He shook it off, looked at the display, and continued, the phone now held several inches from his face. I left.
There are no 'norms' for behavior while on the phone. I see guys at urinals, talking to various people. I always mention, loudly, do you know this guy's calling you while peeing?
1) they have both hands busy, and therefore can't fight 2) if they do, they'll soil themselves 3) they have to immediately explain their actions to the called party.
People are terribly self-centered, and you'll never get around them. It's like the kilowatt jam speakers in people's car trunks, and how they'll rattle the dishes in an neighborhood. They can't hear the sound of my paintball gun over the tops of it-- and I'm sure of this. I hate to waste rounds, but the cars sure do look psychedelic when they pass thru my 'hood.
With apologies in advance, the Atari (despite the fact it could run VisiCalc) was a toy. It wasn't really, with a membrane keyboard, a suitable machine for real work. The Amiga and Commodore and Sinclairs and many others of its ilk didn't posture themselves as business-focused hardware, in my opinion. They're gone. MacOS could have been quite successful but various leadership in the dark ages of Apple didn't understand what was happening and were steamrollered by Microsoft. BeOS was a tragedy. I used Unix, Xenix, and several dozen other 'nix. What mattered were window engines and the maturation of X-- and requisite dull applications that one does day to day work with.
More choices than ever are available today. Linux branches- several. BSD branches (numerous ones, including the Darwin/MacOS branch), Windows (lots), and Be is still around. So is CP/M, UCSD-pascal, and there are those that will give up OS/2 from their dying hands. It would take a year or more to get through all of the possible distros of Linux-- just install the release, surf it, get wet, go on to the next one). Once you're bored with that, there's lots more. Lots.
Consider: there's a group in the geek population that can't stand to see someone else excited about something. Leopard? Cute. Tiger was ok. Jaguar was just fine.
This is Apple stealing thunder from Microsoft. I like it when people are jazzed. So many people are looking down their noses at software these days, it's nice to see some smiles.
There's the Windows brigade, the BSD cowbois and cowgirlz, and the Ubuntu GutzeeGibbonsGoonz, and so on. Ten years ago, you could pretty much do Windows or perhaps that dicey.93 kernel from the Finnish kid. There wasn't much in between. Now there's choices.
But the grammar goons never sleep. It gets worse when you feed them with loads of caffiene, from coffeedrugz or 64ozMondoCokez. Add in some sugar, and they just cannot leap over the hurdle of a possible grammar mistake, even tho the targets are standing up everywhere, the weapon has 500 rounds in it, and the targets aren't hardly moving. It makes one groan.
You're working too hard. You hoped to jump into a fanboi fray, and all you can do is dis someone's choice of a correct article to describe an abbreviated word.
Dude, you're losing it. Go play some XBox, quick, before you implode!
Patent litigation is the last gasp of the shnook. Time to change the batter (CEO).
They couldn't make their MP3 players do very well, the flash drive market is in no-margin-land, and so how do you boost revenue. Hey, Ernie-- we got any patents from that Israeli company we bought a coupla years ago? There's gotta be some money in that stuff.......
Add one boycotter, to another, to another. Spread the word. Don't reward boorish behavior.
If I were to smith the slogans, they'd go something like: Don't Buy From Patent Trolls, or Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Bezos, or Amazon has Pirhanas, or the like.
Or maybe a nice RICO investigation would help, or better still, a nice anti-trust suit.
The only way to get a reaction from boorish behavior in this industry is to hit someone in the wallet.
Don't like this seeming madness? Easy: don't shop at Amazon or any of its affilates.
Maybe they'll stop filing these things.
Perhaps there should be additional legislation that says that patent trolls, having been outed by prior art, should be forced into receivership. There's no spanking these satanic IP holders.
Like other inflection point products, the concept of open source and a Unix-ish kernel caused quite a ruckus.
The attitude that Linux is surrounded by proprietary products is an inaccurate observation. Instead, consider that Linux development, along with other community application efforts, have changed the industry, probably for ever. If you believe in Stallman's version of free, and you look at the other free/freedom projects that have emerged, I'd say that freedom is surrounding other efforts, if not just quietly living beside them.
Tilton's core of nitwits can't get baggage to arrive on time anyway. If you get a United Priority Tag, it's sure to come off last, if you're lucky to have it come on time at all.
What a compleat and total jerk. First he strips out the pensions in bankruptcy, cuts the United FF program to shreds, stops serving food, has one of the worst flight delay records in the industry, now he wants $$ for your baggage arrival. This is extortion, pure and simple.
I'm still dripping blood from my EV.DO (NOT REV A) card (and hideous Verizon rates). My experience is very mixed, but I travel way more than you probably do, 50Kmi+ by air, and at least 10K+ by car in the US. There's EU travel, but I have a handful of nice SIM cards and a separate GSM phone with a bluetooth/EDGE interface for my notebook.
Sprint's 'launch' is definetly planned by the end of this year. No doubt about it. And they won't have full useful coverage for years. Look at their actual game plan, which has been set back several times. Add in the characteristics of WiMAX dispersion and backhaul; it's unlike EV.DO(a) in many ways. My beefs with Sprint are many, too many for a/. post. I currently use Verizon, only for its coverage where I have to travel. I'm an ex-Sprint (and their acquisitions), AT&T (and their acquisitions), ex-T-Mobile, and others going back 20 years this year. I have little faith in Sprint. Sorry. Less in AT&T. I believe your faith to be misplaced.
Hey, look at the 9th Court of Appeals decision today-- no one rides free now-- they backed the FCC on haul issues. There's no SS9 in Internet relationships, but somebody's going to have to pay to ride telco wires. Let's see how *that* plays out. Imagine: a meter inside every Cisco 7XXX or 12XXX.
The bigger problem is that there are no metrics that you can use, like a pint or a joule, to measure broadband usability.
If I said that FIOS/Verizon fiber drops typically got forty-two bammos (my extemporaneously named measure of Internet speed/quality/availability), then you might then say that 802.11n is nine bammos, and EV.DO is two bammos, and so on. There are no useful metrics or standards of measure/availability of the resource to compare with. Bandwidth then becomes a dubious denoninator to sell WiMax or any other technology with. We have the insanity of 2.5G, 3G, 3.5G, 4G, and they're all essentially meaningless and can't be used in any useful way to be considered for broadband replacement merits. Were there a 'bammo', you could say: my bammos are bigger than yours. Or my bammos cost less than your bammos, and I can get my bammos in Richmond Virginia and you can't. Nyah Nyah. That's a draw. You can take that to a boardroom, or an investor community, and say, look at all the bammos and how much we can charge for them. Golly-- let's go spend money on bammo infrastructure. Then we'll sell our bammos infrastructure to .
But that's not happening. And the telcos could soar if they could figure out the capitalization needed to sell bammos. But they're still stuck in a 1950's mindset, despite several issues of Emporer's New Clothing they've tried to wear. The economics could be much different, but the investment community sees tepid returns on WiMax today, and in the near future.... and for good reason.
Significant deployments of perhaps thousands and thousands are not significant in the face of 121million cellphones that don't have WiMax-->IN THE USA TODAY.
I don't argue that WiMax will come of age. But it's licensed spectra, and it costs money, and people are already familiar with paying money to their cellular/mobile carrier and have not had a strong uptake in broadband replacement technologies because of mobility issues and raw cost.
It's not a freight train. It's a Volkswagen Diesel. One day it will grow, but the market has not evolved yet, and will not evolve for several years. I know all too well about the WiMax trials. And I also know all too well about how Earthlink nearly went bankrupt trying to do muni-WiFi, along with the deaths of committments from Google and others to back up muni-WiFi. Muni-WiFi has been set back years, and for good reason: capex, revenue, and support issues abound. WiMax isn't about personal wireless, it's about commercial wireless. It's damn crowded in that market right now, and WiMax penetration, today, is sincerely very low by comparison to numerous other (if fading) technologies. It's not that clear for WiMax. Gear on poles means nothing until penetration gets sufficient revenues. That's why there are no chipsets.
Mmmmmm. One carrier. One that can't straighten their billing systems out.
Ok, let's say for sake of argument that Sprint gets up a sufficient number of towers to cover what needs to be covered, in say five years. They're a single source. Do you think the cellphone makers are going to make a phone that works with only one non-GSM carrier? That doesn't happen much anymore. It's a bad bet.
Sprint's PCS and 1xRTT was delightful. And like other short-sighted manuevers it didn't pay for very long. They're still #3, even after the merger, and now they're leaderless to boot, and looking at a huge capex to get WiMax sufficiently rolled out. Instead of continuing along the EV.DO lines, like Qualcomm/Verizon, they've gone it essentially alone, rather than cooperatively anchoring infrastructure. Typical not-invented-here mentality.
Firsts are significant, but when you can't turn that into marketshare because your customers hate you, then it's only for the history/record books. But Sprint's not the only ones with serious broadband replacement problems. It's endemic to the industry as fiber build-outs continue to make wireless look stupid-- so stupid that even 802.11n is getting play, pre-standard. People want speed. I like WiMax's potential, but there are many good ideas that need cooperative funding and astute planning to meet market challenges. The competition is a good idea, but so far, WiMax does not compel everyone to go out and make waykewl WiMax/"3G" chipsets. It's realistically five years before many handsets will have them, and these will be largely software-defined radios where functionality is burned-in to compelling handset forms. Ask your local Sprint store-- when can I get a waykewl WiMax/3G phone? After they say the phrase, "huh?", crawl through the top nine mobile maker's press releases. Seen anyone announce anything?
Sorry, I forgot to jump up and down. Yay, rah. Three cities, one vendor, one pilot implementation. It's almost as good as beta testing software. Yummy.
And I'll bet it's nationwide, like 1xRTT and ev.do. Nationwide by maybe, Sprint?? Their whole program is in question.
Edge certainly stinks, but at least it's somewhat available, if you can give blood daily, in quarts for it. If and where you can find EV.DO (or even the very rare EV.DOa), it's pricey, also with blood letting, and coverage is at best, mercurial. WiMax could legitimately be a 'broadband replacement' because of its speed, rather than EDGE/UMTS/etc and EV.DOx. But you're going to pay somebody's rates. Face it.
The low-uptake rate has Intel creaming (because it's so nicely tattooed with WiMax) but the chipsets aren't out there, and for very good reasons: *money to support sales*. Not that WiFI is much better, of course, and it can also be very expensive depending on what latte you're drinking today. But a 3G/WiMax chipset won't be seen for a while. Sorry. Currently, WiMax is just another marketing man's hope, and for very good reasons.
Unlike the two segments that are used for IEEE 802.11b/g and then 802.11a, WiMax can have several modes and several bands to use. A software defined radio might one day be a solution, but WiMax has a long way to go before it'll be used like b/g/a as it's 1) licensed spectra and 2) subject to the whims, fortunes, and insanity of various telcos and 3G providers.
So a 3G/Wimax chip's not going to do much good for a few years, where a WiFi/3G chip makes sense, except fo the horrid security in WiFi.
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Actually, Microsoft's localization is pretty good compared to some of the FOSS projects I've seen, not that it excuses Microsoft for other bad behavior. And no country must use Windows in English unless they really want to. There are good and viable choices other than Windows for all but the most obscure languages. See the planetlimux.org site for one interesting adaptation in municipal government as an example.
Why yes, I've heard of WPA2 and other key structures.
.16 uplinks. Some actually support symmetrical backhaul. Only a few vendors do the real work needed, from finding poles, to doing good diligence in making sure that coverage is realistic given many, many obstacles. Fewer still deploy a realistic AES-based security model. Fewer still know the difference between a session handoff and a live handgrenade.
Show me where muni-wifi deployments use it.
Then show me where 802.11i is deployed.
Then show me how many people have updated their client software to support one, or the other.
Then I'll show you the list of failures, the list of plans put on hold, and the plans of many different consortiums that have fallen completely in the ditch.
Cells aren't deployed in dense/sparse models. They're most often unsecured. The entire spectra used has natively awful dispersion characteristics.
Add in business models that don't support/sustain these lofty goals, and it's a mess, and logically, Google and Earthlink, among others, have bailed.
This is a LAN technology, not MAN. Sure, there are guys doing 802.11a and
You likely work for a vendor. Maybe your organization does the right job. Maybe you've found a sustainable long term asset and support management model. Maybe you live in this universe.
Maybe.
The parallel universe you live in seems very interesting. You obviously don't do this for a living at all, do you?
You're entitled to your opinions, you're not entitled to your facts.
Although we'll agree that politicians are in the bag of telcos, there are real and factual difficulties with muni-WiFi
1) bad cellular support grid (3 non-interfering channels, making coverage very difficult)
2) competition with other wireless, paid services (UMTS, EVDO, etc)
3) competition from commercial 'hotspot' providers (hotels, paid-hotspots, etc.)
4) poor business models that caved Google, Earthlink, and others
5) the silliness of using a LAN technology (look at the specs as mentioned up-thread) for a MAN/WAN purpose, as the CSMA/CA technology plainly sucks for services that require mulitple concurrent low-latency streams from a single AP)
6) non-existent subnet handoff (all solutions are proprietary, so far), and lack of VLAN wizardry
7) super-dumb security-- as in NONE as there are no encryption schemes, poor to no authentication (too expensive) and no session controls
Plainly, muni-Wifi is a great idea, if WiFi itself worked, and if there were business models to sustain its deployment. It's a misapplication of the technology, politicians aside. We're just not there yet in terms of building meshes that provide excellent or in many cases, just minimally usable coverage.
I understand the unceasing need for some to communicate. They never shutup, some.
Doing so while in the toilet is another problem altogether. It's just plainly nasty.
Worse, some people will drive a 5-speed, smoke, have a cup of coffee in one hand, and their phone pinned between shoulder and ear, trying to make a dicey high-speed orange light left turn.
For these, an alteration of the aphorism, 'God looks after drunks and little old ladies' needs an appendage.
My paint decoration is suitable payback for your annoyance and disturbance of MY peace. The fine is $225 in my 'hood. A car wash is $7.95. Pick one.
I hope you're jesting.
Oh- what's that sound? It's just my urine splashing against the bowl. Have you not the most basic of manners?
That weird balloonish-noise? The fellow next to me just cut one, could you repeat that again; no, wait, it's the sound of a flush.
Good heavens, man.
There are a few things you don't do in the toilet. One of this is to not eat or drink something. Lots of germs around, not to mention the scents. Another is to hold your dingus in one hand, whilst talking on the phone with someone. Not sanitary or even polite by any stretch of the imagination.
Downtime? Egads-- are you that time pressured??? This isn't efficiency we're talking about, it's very basic manners and decorum. It has nothing to do with conservatism or liberalism-- it's manners! Ask any female or the next three random people you meet, if it's ok to talk on the phone whilst piddling at a urinal. Stand back first. You'll be surprised, I'm guessing.
I watched one guy dump his phone into the urinal. He had to move the deodorant and guard to fetch it. He shook it off, looked at the display, and continued, the phone now held several inches from his face. I left.
There are no 'norms' for behavior while on the phone. I see guys at urinals, talking to various people. I always mention, loudly, do you know this guy's calling you while peeing?
1) they have both hands busy, and therefore can't fight
2) if they do, they'll soil themselves
3) they have to immediately explain their actions to the called party.
People are terribly self-centered, and you'll never get around them. It's like the kilowatt jam speakers in people's car trunks, and how they'll rattle the dishes in an neighborhood. They can't hear the sound of my paintball gun over the tops of it-- and I'm sure of this. I hate to waste rounds, but the cars sure do look psychedelic when they pass thru my 'hood.
With apologies in advance, the Atari (despite the fact it could run VisiCalc) was a toy. It wasn't really, with a membrane keyboard, a suitable machine for real work. The Amiga and Commodore and Sinclairs and many others of its ilk didn't posture themselves as business-focused hardware, in my opinion. They're gone. MacOS could have been quite successful but various leadership in the dark ages of Apple didn't understand what was happening and were steamrollered by Microsoft. BeOS was a tragedy. I used Unix, Xenix, and several dozen other 'nix. What mattered were window engines and the maturation of X-- and requisite dull applications that one does day to day work with.
More choices than ever are available today. Linux branches- several. BSD branches (numerous ones, including the Darwin/MacOS branch), Windows (lots), and Be is still around. So is CP/M, UCSD-pascal, and there are those that will give up OS/2 from their dying hands. It would take a year or more to get through all of the possible distros of Linux-- just install the release, surf it, get wet, go on to the next one). Once you're bored with that, there's lots more. Lots.
Consider: there's a group in the geek population that can't stand to see someone else excited about something. Leopard? Cute. Tiger was ok. Jaguar was just fine.
.93 kernel from the Finnish kid. There wasn't much in between. Now there's choices.
This is Apple stealing thunder from Microsoft. I like it when people are jazzed. So many people are looking down their noses at software these days, it's nice to see some smiles.
There's the Windows brigade, the BSD cowbois and cowgirlz, and the Ubuntu GutzeeGibbonsGoonz, and so on. Ten years ago, you could pretty much do Windows or perhaps that dicey
But the grammar goons never sleep. It gets worse when you feed them with loads of caffiene, from coffeedrugz or 64ozMondoCokez. Add in some sugar, and they just cannot leap over the hurdle of a possible grammar mistake, even tho the targets are standing up everywhere, the weapon has 500 rounds in it, and the targets aren't hardly moving. It makes one groan.
You're working too hard. You hoped to jump into a fanboi fray, and all you can do is dis someone's choice of a correct article to describe an abbreviated word.
Dude, you're losing it. Go play some XBox, quick, before you implode!
Patent litigation is the last gasp of the shnook. Time to change the batter (CEO).
They couldn't make their MP3 players do very well, the flash drive market is in no-margin-land, and so how do you boost revenue. Hey, Ernie-- we got any patents from that Israeli company we bought a coupla years ago? There's gotta be some money in that stuff.......
Add one boycotter, to another, to another. Spread the word. Don't reward boorish behavior.
If I were to smith the slogans, they'd go something like: Don't Buy From Patent Trolls, or Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Bezos, or Amazon has Pirhanas, or the like.
Or maybe a nice RICO investigation would help, or better still, a nice anti-trust suit.
The only way to get a reaction from boorish behavior in this industry is to hit someone in the wallet.
Don't like this seeming madness? Easy: don't shop at Amazon or any of its affilates.
Maybe they'll stop filing these things.
Perhaps there should be additional legislation that says that patent trolls, having been outed by prior art, should be forced into receivership. There's no spanking these satanic IP holders.
Imagine: Boot up, and Microsoft asks you for PayPal.
Or perhaps, Google checkout.
Or, in a more perfect world, which EU open license you'd prefer.
Ok, the last one required too much science fiction.
Like other inflection point products, the concept of open source and a Unix-ish kernel caused quite a ruckus.
The attitude that Linux is surrounded by proprietary products is an inaccurate observation. Instead, consider that Linux development, along with other community application efforts, have changed the industry, probably for ever. If you believe in Stallman's version of free, and you look at the other free/freedom projects that have emerged, I'd say that freedom is surrounding other efforts, if not just quietly living beside them.
Tilton's core of nitwits can't get baggage to arrive on time anyway. If you get a United Priority Tag, it's sure to come off last, if you're lucky to have it come on time at all.
What a compleat and total jerk. First he strips out the pensions in bankruptcy, cuts the United FF program to shreds, stops serving food, has one of the worst flight delay records in the industry, now he wants $$ for your baggage arrival. This is extortion, pure and simple.
I'm still dripping blood from my EV.DO (NOT REV A) card (and hideous Verizon rates). My experience is very mixed, but I travel way more than you probably do, 50Kmi+ by air, and at least 10K+ by car in the US. There's EU travel, but I have a handful of nice SIM cards and a separate GSM phone with a bluetooth/EDGE interface for my notebook.
/. post. I currently use Verizon, only for its coverage where I have to travel. I'm an ex-Sprint (and their acquisitions), AT&T (and their acquisitions), ex-T-Mobile, and others going back 20 years this year. I have little faith in Sprint. Sorry. Less in AT&T. I believe your faith to be misplaced.
Sprint's 'launch' is definetly planned by the end of this year. No doubt about it. And they won't have full useful coverage for years. Look at their actual game plan, which has been set back several times. Add in the characteristics of WiMAX dispersion and backhaul; it's unlike EV.DO(a) in many ways. My beefs with Sprint are many, too many for a
Hey, look at the 9th Court of Appeals decision today-- no one rides free now-- they backed the FCC on haul issues. There's no SS9 in Internet relationships, but somebody's going to have to pay to ride telco wires. Let's see how *that* plays out. Imagine: a meter inside every Cisco 7XXX or 12XXX.
We largely agree.
The bigger problem is that there are no metrics that you can use, like a pint or a joule, to measure broadband usability.
If I said that FIOS/Verizon fiber drops typically got forty-two bammos (my extemporaneously named measure of Internet speed/quality/availability), then you might then say that 802.11n is nine bammos, and EV.DO is two bammos, and so on. There are no useful metrics or standards of measure/availability of the resource to compare with. Bandwidth then becomes a dubious denoninator to sell WiMax or any other technology with. We have the insanity of 2.5G, 3G, 3.5G, 4G, and they're all essentially meaningless and can't be used in any useful way to be considered for broadband replacement merits. Were there a 'bammo', you could say: my bammos are bigger than yours. Or my bammos cost less than your bammos, and I can get my bammos in Richmond Virginia and you can't. Nyah Nyah. That's a draw. You can take that to a boardroom, or an investor community, and say, look at all the bammos and how much we can charge for them. Golly-- let's go spend money on bammo infrastructure. Then we'll sell our bammos infrastructure to .
But that's not happening. And the telcos could soar if they could figure out the capitalization needed to sell bammos. But they're still stuck in a 1950's mindset, despite several issues of Emporer's New Clothing they've tried to wear. The economics could be much different, but the investment community sees tepid returns on WiMax today, and in the near future.... and for good reason.
We disagree.
Significant deployments of perhaps thousands and thousands are not significant in the face of 121million cellphones that don't have WiMax-->IN THE USA TODAY.
I don't argue that WiMax will come of age. But it's licensed spectra, and it costs money, and people are already familiar with paying money to their cellular/mobile carrier and have not had a strong uptake in broadband replacement technologies because of mobility issues and raw cost.
It's not a freight train. It's a Volkswagen Diesel. One day it will grow, but the market has not evolved yet, and will not evolve for several years. I know all too well about the WiMax trials. And I also know all too well about how Earthlink nearly went bankrupt trying to do muni-WiFi, along with the deaths of committments from Google and others to back up muni-WiFi. Muni-WiFi has been set back years, and for good reason: capex, revenue, and support issues abound. WiMax isn't about personal wireless, it's about commercial wireless. It's damn crowded in that market right now, and WiMax penetration, today, is sincerely very low by comparison to numerous other (if fading) technologies. It's not that clear for WiMax. Gear on poles means nothing until penetration gets sufficient revenues. That's why there are no chipsets.
Mmmmmm. One carrier. One that can't straighten their billing systems out.
Ok, let's say for sake of argument that Sprint gets up a sufficient number of towers to cover what needs to be covered, in say five years. They're a single source. Do you think the cellphone makers are going to make a phone that works with only one non-GSM carrier? That doesn't happen much anymore. It's a bad bet.
Sprint's PCS and 1xRTT was delightful. And like other short-sighted manuevers it didn't pay for very long. They're still #3, even after the merger, and now they're leaderless to boot, and looking at a huge capex to get WiMax sufficiently rolled out. Instead of continuing along the EV.DO lines, like Qualcomm/Verizon, they've gone it essentially alone, rather than cooperatively anchoring infrastructure. Typical not-invented-here mentality.
Firsts are significant, but when you can't turn that into marketshare because your customers hate you, then it's only for the history/record books. But Sprint's not the only ones with serious broadband replacement problems. It's endemic to the industry as fiber build-outs continue to make wireless look stupid-- so stupid that even 802.11n is getting play, pre-standard. People want speed. I like WiMax's potential, but there are many good ideas that need cooperative funding and astute planning to meet market challenges. The competition is a good idea, but so far, WiMax does not compel everyone to go out and make waykewl WiMax/"3G" chipsets. It's realistically five years before many handsets will have them, and these will be largely software-defined radios where functionality is burned-in to compelling handset forms. Ask your local Sprint store-- when can I get a waykewl WiMax/3G phone? After they say the phrase, "huh?", crawl through the top nine mobile maker's press releases. Seen anyone announce anything?
Sorry, I forgot to jump up and down. Yay, rah. Three cities, one vendor, one pilot implementation. It's almost as good as beta testing software. Yummy.
And I'll bet it's nationwide, like 1xRTT and ev.do. Nationwide by maybe, Sprint?? Their whole program is in question.
Edge certainly stinks, but at least it's somewhat available, if you can give blood daily, in quarts for it. If and where you can find EV.DO (or even the very rare EV.DOa), it's pricey, also with blood letting, and coverage is at best, mercurial. WiMax could legitimately be a 'broadband replacement' because of its speed, rather than EDGE/UMTS/etc and EV.DOx. But you're going to pay somebody's rates. Face it.
The low-uptake rate has Intel creaming (because it's so nicely tattooed with WiMax) but the chipsets aren't out there, and for very good reasons: *money to support sales*. Not that WiFI is much better, of course, and it can also be very expensive depending on what latte you're drinking today. But a 3G/WiMax chipset won't be seen for a while. Sorry. Currently, WiMax is just another marketing man's hope, and for very good reasons.
Unlike the two segments that are used for IEEE 802.11b/g and then 802.11a, WiMax can have several modes and several bands to use. A software defined radio might one day be a solution, but WiMax has a long way to go before it'll be used like b/g/a as it's 1) licensed spectra and 2) subject to the whims, fortunes, and insanity of various telcos and 3G providers.
So a 3G/Wimax chip's not going to do much good for a few years, where a WiFi/3G chip makes sense, except fo the horrid security in WiFi.