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Bobby_M

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You're gonna love WiMAX!.

I just got back from a conference in Chicago called Wimax world. I think the technology for the most part has been flying under the radar. It's something that's been rolled out internatanally for a while but companies in the U.S are just getting warmed up.

In a nutshell, picture coverage areas the size of cell phones with broadband speeds of 7-10 Mbps downstream (at ANY speed of mobility). At first you'll get your service using a standalone modem in your home or via a USB dongle on your laptop but eventually it will be completely integrated like wifi is today. I'm sure the next gen iPhone will also be wimax integrated.

The killer thing is the price. Fixed nomadic service for about $35/month. Nomadic + Mobilility with voice $60. Wooooo
 
The company I work for has been pouring mad $ into this for years. It's nice to finally see something coming together.
 
I have been reading about this for a few years now. I know the city of philadelphia was talking about it and I think that have done it in certain areas to some extent. At least I think I remembering hearing about that a few months ago.
 
Here in Portland we have a test Wimax zone. I'm not part of the pilot but know a couple of people who are. They say it's amazingly fast.

On a side note - I'm not an engineer, but I often wonder how all of these radio waves flying around these days are affecting us, if at all. Seems like the FCC is approving new spectrum all of the time - there must be like 50x more flying around than there was 50 years ago.
 
What companies are involved with getting it to market?
 
Isnt the miliatry doing something similiar. they are proposing "internet" with out wires..

that would be awsome. I still have the DSL. I want VOIP so bad but cost of comast at home & voip is more expensive then having a basic phone with dsl LOL
 
The big companies involved from a service perspective are Sprint/Clearwire who just rolled out their Xohm product in Baltimore. Out in Utah and Colorado, Digital Bridge Communications is doing the same thing is small markets.

Equipment? Intel for the chipsets, Samsung for the handhelds, ZTE for other doohickies. Nortel and Alvarion for network side.

The best most of us can do right now is 3G which you can get with laptop cards and the latest iPhone (and clones). 3G provides about 100-300 kbps in real world conditions. By comparison, WiMAX is about 100 times faster and better at mobility (think streaming HD video in the passenger seat of a car on the freeway).
 
My FIL was the president of the optical networking division of Lucent, and used to say(without going into detail) that the stuff they were working on was "Star Trek" futuristic, so news like this isn't surprising.
He used to say that once the infrastructure was in place it really costs virtually nothing to actually use the network, so I don't know why all systems aren't unlimited
 
On a side note - I'm not an engineer, but I often wonder how all of these radio waves flying around these days are affecting us, if at all. Seems like the FCC is approving new spectrum all of the time - there must be like 50x more flying around than there was 50 years ago.


yeah, but some are going away too, such as transmitted TV waves, which will go away once the switchover happens in a bit to digital.
 
New York City was looking at installing cell phone towers in the subway system a few years back. I am pretty sure they stopped because WiMAX would be coming out soon and they were just going to wait and have that available underground.
 
The big companies involved from a service perspective are Sprint/Clearwire who just rolled out their Xohm product in Baltimore. Out in Utah and Colorado, Digital Bridge Communications is doing the same thing is small markets.

Equipment? Intel for the chipsets, Samsung for the handhelds, ZTE for other doohickies. Nortel and Alvarion for network side.

The best most of us can do right now is 3G which you can get with laptop cards and the latest iPhone (and clones). 3G provides about 100-300 kbps in real world conditions. By comparison, WiMAX is about 100 times faster and better at mobility (think streaming HD video in the passenger seat of a car on the freeway).

Yeah, I don't think it's been made clear how much faster throughput Wimax enables than current tech. 3G is terrible by comparison. Using my IPhone for browsing via 3G is awful. Wimax in most cases will be faster than your cable or DSL connection at home.
 
I don't think there's a clear winner between the various 4G technologies. The good thing is that they all use very similar core protocols and a merge of technologies in the future is realistic.
 
My FIL was the president of the optical networking division of Lucent, and used to say(without going into detail) that the stuff they were working on was "Star Trek" futuristic, so news like this isn't surprising.
He used to say that once the infrastructure was in place it really costs virtually nothing to actually use the network, so I don't know why all systems aren't unlimited

money. just as it costs carriers minuscule costs for sms they charge us 15 to 20 cents both ways. and when i say minuscule i mean fractional of a penny. don't know the real number but lets just say the mark up is thousands of a percent. the bad thing is the allocation of bands for this. seems like its all over the place.

2.5ghz 1.7ghz 2.1ghz 3.65 ghz and 2.6. this will be the killer since it is all over the place. makes it hard to jump from one to another and will be like cell phones were in the early 90's and the fight between smr and PCS
 
The biggest problem is actually the internet backbone. There's nowhere near enough capacity if most of the population gets 10M access in any short time frame. The traffic on the internet is estimated at 160 Terabytes per second, 10% of which is youtube.
 
money. just as it costs carriers minuscule costs for sms they charge us 15 to 20 cents both ways. and when i say minuscule i mean fractional of a penny. don't know the real number but lets just say the mark up is thousands of a percent.

Just some basic math.

A typically cell phone call is ~10Kbps. That's ~600,000 bits per minute. Obviously, cell calls are very profitable at 10c/min (often quite less). Which means that bits are profitable at $0.0000002 per bit.

Also, Verizon (for example) sells it's EV-DO service (profitably, I presume) for $50/mo with a 5GB limit. That's $0.00000000116 per bit.

A text message is 160 chars maximum. They are 7 bit chars and typically run 40-60 chars, let's call that 160char @ 10 bits, or 1600 bits/message. They typically costs $0.10each, or $0.0000625 per bit. That's 375x (37500%) the price of profitable voice traffic or 53,740x (5374083%).

Suffice it to say that text messaging a outrageously profitable item that should be included on any carrier plan...
 
The company I work for has been pouring mad $ into this for years. It's nice to finally see something coming together.

Hey blacklab, I also work for a company that has been dumping a lot of $$$ into this as well. Im out here in Ca, norcal that is. Wondering if we work for the same company.???

Thinking we may work for the same or may be partners. ??? Anyway, I too love the WIMAX, great speeds.
 
The best most of us can do right now is 3G which you can get with laptop cards and the latest iPhone (and clones). 3G provides about 100-300 kbps in real world conditions. By comparison, WiMAX is about 100 times faster and better at mobility (think streaming HD video in the passenger seat of a car on the freeway).

Oh great, just what we need, soon I'll have to worry about the bozo in the F350 next to me ****ing off to porn vids in traffic!!! :eek:
 
Hey blacklab, I also work for a company that has been dumping a lot of $$$ into this as well. Im out here in Ca, norcal that is. Wondering if we work for the same company.???

Thinking we may work for the same or may be partners. ??? Anyway, I too love the WIMAX, great speeds.

Yeah, me too. I was wondering the same thing but I think I will leave it alone from here.
 
Hey blacklab, I also work for a company that has been dumping a lot of $$$ into this as well. Im out here in Ca, norcal that is. Wondering if we work for the same company.???

Thinking we may work for the same or may be partners. ??? Anyway, I too love the WIMAX, great speeds.

I'm guessing that if you guys commute to Santa Clara, that's the case.
 
WiMAX - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

thing is most companies are going with lte or looking very heavy into going that way. right now the standard is umts/3g


Correct, Verizon and AT&T are going LTE and Sprint is going Wimax. Each are a differnet kind of 4G. What Sprint and Verizon have been using for the last couple years was EVDO. AT&T commercials make me laugh, 3G has been around for quite a while and they push it like it just came out.
 
I would really like to see this is the more rural parts of the country. WiFi just doesn't make it where the population density is low. A single WiMAX station could serve everyone in my town and up the valley (and more specifically, I could get off of this d#$% satellite DSL and its 250 ms latency).
 
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