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Is mobile WiMAX a myth?
The big news in the wireless industry recently has been the consortium of companies that have come together to invest in Sprint and Clearwire’s WiMAX build-out. The news has generated a lot of positive buzz for WiMAX, which has generally been taking a beating in the press this year.
But not everyone is so positive on the news. Erick Schonfeld in Seeking Alpha says that “Google got snookered” in the deal, and lays out several reasons why. Erick states his main reason as follows:
What I do know is that Google came reluctantly to the table and that for a long time the deal was being blocked internally at Google for some very good reasons. The main reason is that WiMax, as Clearwire is deploying it, is not a very good replacement for mobile broadband services. It is, above all, a fixed wireless solution. What it replaces is wired broadband services to homes and offices delivered through cable and DSL. That is how Clearwire is selling it today.
But wait…haven’t we all heard over and over about WiMAX (along with LTE) as capable of delivering the true mobile wireless broadband nirvana that 4G wireless can bring? In today’s increasingly mobile world, are muni wifi and rural deployments where DSL/Cable aren’t available the best that WiMAX can do? Is mobile WiMAX a myth?
No, say a few Nortel WiMAX engineers in Ottawa. Early this year, our guys in Ottawa put some effort into setting up and demonstrating a “Live Air WiMAX demo” for 70 customers visiting the campus. The video below summarizes the demo, which showed the ability to do seamless video and voice “hand-offs” between Nortel WiMAX base stations at speeds of 60 kilometers per hour (the demo was set up in a van). See the demo video below.
So don’t count WiMAX out as a technology capable of giving you all the mobile bandwidth you need for that cool new iPhone of yours — which turns out to be quite a bandwidth hog by the way.
