Martin Courtney

A lot has been written about WiMax technology recently, but it’s important to remember that there are two types of this wireless broadband technology. Both have different roadmaps, applications and chances of short- and long-term success.

The fixed wireless version is available and on the brink of widespread deployment in the UK, where a viable business case for using it has been identified. The mobile version is a different story, irrespective of what Intel says.

Some say fixed WiMax broadband services will struggle to displace other broadband technologies and find a niche in Britain’s urban sprawls. But WiMax does have potential to offer the same bandwidth as DSL and fibre alternatives and at a fairer price. Or at least a price that service providers feel the market can bear while being competitive enough to convince business customers to switch.

Pilot services suggest WiMax providers aim to challenge high-cost symmetrical DSL (SDSL) and even more extortionate metropolitan area network (MAN) Ethernet offerings. So as long as fixed WiMax can answer lingering questions about line-of-sight requirements and radio interference problems, undercutting rival prices by 50 percent or more might well prove a winning strategy.

So the mountain that fixed WiMax has to climb doesn’t look too steep or fraught with competitive danger, after all. But the same is not true of mobile WiMax, even though Intel said it will ship WiMax cards and integrated adapters in the second half of this year.

It will be some time before there are enough mobile WiMax clients in the wild to persuade service providers that the pool of potential customers is big enough to warrant commercial offerings. And by that time, Wi-Fi may already have achieved blanket coverage in the UK’s travel hubs, where most road warriors kill a little time by responding to emails or browsing the web.

And when those same travellers find themselves out of hotspot range, third-generation (3G) mobile connections based on faster High-Speed DownLink Packet Access (HSDPA) are waiting to pounce, scheduled to start delivering around 1.5Mbit/s of bandwidth to anyone with a suitably enabled PC Card or mobile handset by the end of this year.

So it’s hard to see where WiMax fits in, other than perhaps, to do exactly the same thing only faster. If that’s the case, why bother having either Wi-Fi or 3G at all, especially considering that putting WiMax chips alongside either in portable devices is likely to be a crippling drain on power?

But perhaps that is actually what the WiMax supporters have in mind: mobile WiMax not as a supplement to existing incarnations of wireless broadband, but a straightforward long-term replacement that avoids the one problem that manufacturers of mobile devices never seem to satisfactorily solve – battery life.

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