WiMax In 2010 — Too Little, Too Late? 128
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.'"
Depends on when they will roll out wimax (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Trouble prone (Score:2, Informative)
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)
This is a non issue (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Depends on when they will roll out wimax (Score:2, Informative)
The LTE specification provides downlink peak rates of at least 100 Mbps, an uplink of at least 50 Mbit/s and RAN round-trip times of less than 10 ms. LTE supports scalable carrier bandwidths, from 20 MHz down to 1.4 MHz and supports both Frequency Division Duplexing and Time Division Duplexing. Part of the LTE standard is the System Architecture Evolution, a flat IP-based network architecture designed to replace the GPRS Core Network and ensure support for, and mobility between, some legacy or non-3GPP systems, for example GPRS and WiMax respectively.[5] The main advantages with LTE are high throughput, low latency, plug and play, FDD and TDD in the same platform, improved end-user experience and simple architecture resulting in low operating expenditures. LTE will also support seamless passing to cell towers with older network technology such as GSM, cdmaOne, W-CDMA (UMTS), and CDMA2000.
As seen here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP_Long_Term_Evolution [wikipedia.org]
Re:Umm (Score:4, Informative)
We are doing it so we can deliver broadband Internet to those people who simply never had it before in any shape or form. Hard as the concept is for 1st world geeks to grasp, there are places where it's likely, you don't have a phone line running by the house and where if you do it's most likely beyond the effective range of ADSL.
3G can do the same thing too. Except the technology is so expensive (compared to WiMax) that it's only worthwhile s a premium service, bundled with expensive phones and high end call rate packages. I.e. Outside the price range of 2 million of our current customers.
Re:lol what? (Score:4, Informative)
link [wikipedia.org]
Well over 4 billion have electricity. [rice.edu]
The world literacy rate is about 82%: about 5 billion. link [wikipedia.org]
Re:Umm (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't realize Wimax was in such a sorry state in the US. Here in Korea it is absolutely terrific.
The entire city of Seoul is set up and running. Its called Wibro
I pay the equivalent of about $20 a month. I get this fantastic little thing called an Egg. Its basically a battery operated wimax router. It takes in wimax and converts it to wifi.
I get a 50GB/month limit for that $20.
it works anywhere in the city (and a fair distance outside the actual city itself). Seoul has over 250 subway stations that would normally be off limits but every single station has a broadcast station in it.
It runs at 18Mb/second.. I've used it with my touch to make skype calls on the subway. I didn't notice any significant lag in doing that. In fact comparing what I heard in that call and at home on my 100/10 fiber, I couldn't tell any difference in quality.
Battery is good for around 5-6 hours and charges on a standard cell phone charger (they have those in korea)
Re:WiMax isn't what they've promised (Score:1, Informative)
I fully agree, I work for a business isp up here in canada that has a wimax product that we position at 3mbps x 640kbps iirc and we have nothing but trouble with it. Some of that is our horrible management tool which is unrelated to the tech, but the modems that we use are junk (but still cost 300$ a pop). Our towers can barely support 30 or so subscribers before users suffer performance issues. It suffers from tower hopping when in close proximity to multiple strong towers (unlike cell phones, wimax does not transfer cleanly between towers). As far as range, the absolute best I have ever seen is 18km in a rural area that was only possible because of the absolute best combination of beneficial factors. In our cities, we have users 1km away from a tower unable to get signal due to interference sources. We have quite a bit of coverage, but we're hearing rumours that they want to phase it out potentially because it just does not live up to our expectation so that major investment will probably go to waste.
Re:Umm (Score:2, Informative)
My dad in Norway just got broadband Internet access for the first time. The area he live in has build a private, but government subsidised WiMax network.
It might have been 10 more years before anyone had bothered with fiber. The population density of the municipality is 0.7 / km2.
We have many places like that in our first world country.