During a speech at the Wireless Communications Association conference this week, Intel predicted that the next 10 years would be defined by broadband wireless: Intel has become a big supporter of WiMAX, hoping to see Wi-Fi and WiMAX bundled into computers.
Some of the challenges facing WiMAX mentioned in this New York Times article aren't quite on track. For example, the piece says that the spectrum needed to deploy WiMAX isn't yet available. In fact the MMDS license holders could deploy WiMAX. Those licenses are owned by Nextel, Bellsouth, and others.
But John Markoff notes that the lower band frequencies are more ideal because radio signals travel further lower down on the spectrum. Those bands are very crowded and not much is available for hopeful operators. This is the argument the 802.20 standard developers are making. That standard is designed for very small swaths of spectrum in the lower bands to accommodate for the fact that only little bits of spectrum on the lower end are available.
Markoff also challenged an Intel exec on past failures to make a market for fixed broadband wireless services, likely referring to the failure of the MMDS market in the mid-1990s and others like Metricom. The developers of 802.16, however, clearly had in mind the problems that faced those initiatives. For example, the second version of 802.16 will eliminate the need for an outdoor antenna at the customer premise. Installing such antennas is an expensive proposition and that expense is said to have contributed to the downfall of the MMDS initiatives in the mid-1990s.
So far AT&T and Covad have joined the WiMAX Forum but no operator has said it plans to deploy the technology.