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.

Google's White Space WIFI Plan

The dust is finally settling from the recent US Government auction of licenses to operate using the 700MHZ spectrum that will be freed as Televisions move to "digital only" signals in 2009.

Verizon was the winner of most of the new spectrum by bidding the highest, and thus will have a new and commanding mobile presence. However Google has some ideas of their own about how to use the "white space", or unused parts of the spectrum, for WIFI signals to handheld devices. Many analysts feel that Google was participating in the multi-billion high stakes auction for the purpose of creating open access in the mobile space rather than for the purpose of owning the licenses, and if so Google appears to have succeeded in their goal.

CNET parses today's statement from Google about their future plans which appear to include a massive increase in the bandwidth and usage of mobile wireless devices that will use the open operating system for mobile devices "Android" as well as have the active support of the Open Handset Alliance.