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Wimax Consortium Coming Very Soon
By Joseph Hunkins at May 06, 2008 2 CommentsSprint’s wimax initiatives appeared to falter last year as they faced serious challenges from ATT and Verizon and broke up with Clearwire, but there is a new broadband wind in Sprint’s sails and the New York Times is reporting that a major wimax technology consortium will be announced soon - probably tomorrow. The consortium includes Sprint Nextel, Google, Intel, Comcast, Time Warner and Clearwire.
Two big advantages of wimax broadband is that it can provide extensive rural connectivity where a single tower can provide broadband coverage over an area of many square miles. Also, wimax offers great opportunities for mobile broadband. e.g. Police cruisers throughout a city can all have high speed connectivity at a very modest cost.
If the consortium is successful, look for more communities to adopt this standard and more widespread rural high speed connectivity. Perhaps unfortunately, the more lucrative urban environments already have many broadband choices in the form of DSL, Cable, EVDO, and Satellite. With the heavy capital costs of these deployments there will hopefully be enough profit left in the equation to provide consumers with many low cost choices for their broadband connection.
Labels: ATT, broadband, sprint, verizon, wimax
2 Comments
It will be great if Sprint can make WIMAX happen in the States…
Sprint has been growing pre-WIMAX and WIMAX from the wireless MMDS days in the 1980s!
Selz I’d pretty much given up on Wimax but now I’m optimistic - it’s a really good technology, especially for rural where you want to cover large distances with a blanket signal.