Widespread WiMax a Possibility Soon

[Mike Peregrine]

Sprint is freaking their local investors out in KC after announcing a $5 billion dollar deal to drench the country in WiMax.

Sprint has 2 year exclusivity on the offering, with an unbelievable 40 month promised return on investment. They believe WiMax will be the next huge thing, and are willing to toss all their eggs into one basket. They say that there will soon be a day when people will laugh and say 'hey, remember when we used to go to Starbucks for internet?'

WiMax is super high speed internet access that utilizes microwave energy beamed across great distances, making it a very real possibility in the middle of nowhere. What's cool about it? Camera manufacturers are promising to embed WiMax chips in their video cameras that allow the photographer to shoot and stream simultaneous video at high resolution, so that Joe can show the kids' dance recital to grandma and grandpa across the country as it happens ....... I think we can see the wheels turning in more than one chasers' head at this point.

Sprint is proposing a backbone of towers across the country that will make this a widespread possibility even in rural areas. My guess is that they have figured out a way to propagate the signal much further than previously tested.

Here's the local article.

Edit - Sorry folks ... just saw Scott Kampas' similar thread on the subject ...

 

[David Wolfson]

... from the Wikipedia

A commonly-held misconception is that WiMAX will deliver 70 Mbit/s over 50 kilometers. Both of these qualities are true individually, given ideal circumstances, but they are not simultaneously true. WiMAX has some similarities to DSL in this respect, where one can either have high bandwidth or long reach, but not both simultaneously.
The nature of wireless communications dictates that the antenna design will have a substantial impact on what is achievable. Typically, Fixed WiMAX networks have a higher-gain directional antenna installed externally at the customer's premises which results in greatly increased range and throughput. Mobile WiMAX networks comprise mostly of indoor CPEs such as desktop modems, laptops with integrated Mobile WiMAX or other Mobile WiMAX devices. Mobile WiMAX devices typically have an antenna design which is of lower-gain by nature due to their inherent omni-directional (and portable) design. In practice this means that in a line-of-sight environment with a portable Mobile WiMAX CPE, symmetrical speeds of 10 Mbit/s at 10 km could be delivered, but in urban environments it is more likely that these devices will not have line-of-sight and therefore users may only receive 10 Mbit/s over 2 km. Higher-gain directional antennas can be used with a Mobile WiMAX network with range and throughput benefits but the obvious loss of practical mobility.
Like most wireless systems, available bandwidth is shared between users in a given radio sector, so performance could deteriorate in the case of many active users in a single sector, especially if proper capacity planning has not been undertaken. In practice, many users will have a range of 2-, 4-, 6-, 8-, 10- or 12 Mbit/s services and additional radio cards will be added to the base station to increase the capacity as required.

Sprint wants to run WiMAX in their 2.5GHz band which starts to get into precip attenuation problems. It really seems to be more designed for fixed-base node-node networking and directional, adaptive antenna technology than for mobile omni use, where it doesn't appear to offer that much better specs than EVDO delivers from multiple carriers.