AT&T said it plans to use WiMax to deliver voice and data services to residential customers: Covad has the same plan and has already begun testing broadband wireless equipment. I'm curious about what frequencies the operators plan to use. I continue to hear from vendors and operators that most major carriers wouldn't deploy WiMax in unlicensed frequencies but as far as I know neither Covad or AT&T have significant licenses for spectrum that would be ideal for WiMax. I also continue to hear that the first batch of commercial certified WiMax gear will operate in 3.5 GHz, a piece of the spectrum that has been licensed in other regions but not the United States. The 2.5 GHz band, licensed to operators such as Nextel and Craig McCaw's Clearwire, will come six months later, at the soonest. That means that operators in the United States that wish to deploy WiMax in the unlicensed bands won't be able to do so for quite a while. In the meantime, I suspect that they'll have to use WiMax-like equipment rather than officially certified gear.
This CNET piece says that Covad is envisioning a 2005 commercial rollout, but notes that timeframe may be ambitious because Intel doesn't expect WiMax to be integrated into notebooks until 2006. That's irrelevant because before Intel does that, other vendors will build CPE equipment that won't be embedded into computers.