Wimax Consortium Coming Very Soon

Sprint'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.

Time Warner: Splitting Their Cable

Time Warner has announced that they'll be divesting themselves of the substantial stake they have in Time Warner Cable in what Stacy at GigaOm suggests is the beginning of a "Death by 1000 Cuts" where the ailing Time Warner empire will crumble via attrition as they sell themselves off piece by piece.

Although I'd suggest it is far too early to predict their ultimate fate, it would seem that the Time Warner approach is not what you'd expect from a company that wants to ultimately prevail in the media business. TW was one of the few big companies that saw the coming convergence of offline and online media years ago. With a huge Cable Division, AOL, and Motion Pictures many thought Time Warner was poised to be a major player as media convergence brought economies of scale to the companies management, developments, and production equations. Yet almost the opposite has happened for Time Warner. The stock after the AOL merger fell dramatically and has languished for years, and apparently Time Warner is now deciding to try to extract as much value from the empire as possible rather than build for the future, though perhaps they are reasonably assuming that a tight focus will allow them to become a smaller but more profitable venture.

Will this be death by 1000 cuts or a clever corporate redirection?

Only Time ... Warner ... will tell.

Intel´s WIFI Rural Connectivity Platform - good news for rural networking

Intel has developed a new technology to dramatically increase the distance of a WIFI signal cheaply. The system uses radio signals to stretch the WIFI signal up to ¨tens of miles¨. For rural areas in poor countries this could signal a dramatic shift in the way they utilize broadband internet. Combined with the increasingly popularity of mesh networking - which allows nearby computers to share wireless broadband - the inexpensive Intel systems will help bring broadband internet access to areas where it would have been cost prohibitive before. Deployments are now working in India, Vietnam, Panama, and South Africa.

Kate at Technology Review