WiMax likely choice for 'Net access in emerging markets
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InfoWorld - As the mobile phone industry scrambles to put cellphones in the hands of billions of unconnected people in emerging markets, less-expensive, higher-speed WiMax is likely to be the technology of choice to connect them to the Internet.
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A boat trip on the Chicago River helped show WiMax as a fast mobile wireless network technology, but less clear are when mobile workers and consumers can get the products, at what price and how WiMax world will interact with Wi-Fi or other networks.
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TechWeb - The company will be one of the first to test mobile Wimax in the United States.
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Intel has been touting WiMax -- the long-range, high-bandwidth wireless data protocol -- for years. Now it's about to pay off. At Intel Developer Forum today, Intel's David Perlmutter promises that notebook vendors will ship WiMax-enabled computers next year.
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Expect mobile broadband access to be commonplace in the next couple of years. The technologies are here and so is the demand, but spectrum and cost issues remain.
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New WiMax partners say they will blanket the U.S. with an open network on the 700MHz band.
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An emerging long-range,  high-speed wireless technology is expected to spread quickly  and be available globally within two years, a key backer of the  so-called WiMax technology said on Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Sprint Nextel plans to cooperate with enterprises on the rollout of its WiMax mobile broadband network, letting the customers install and own short-range base stations in their buildings with automatic roaming onto the carrier's WiMax network outside. Enterprises will be a big market for the WiMax service, said Atish Gude, senior vice president of mobile broadband operations at Sprint, in an interview Wednesday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The service, planned for a national rollout next year under the Xohm brand name, is designed to deliver Internet access at megabits per second on a standards-based technology that has been heavily promoted by Intel. For enterprises, it will be similar to Wi-Fi, only more secure and with easy roaming onto a carrier network that spans whole metropolitan areas, Gude said. Sprint has sent out an RFP (request for proposals) for WiMax femtocells, or miniature base stations meant to serve a home or other small area, Gude confirmed. He expects large enterprises to buy and deploy femtocells for consistent coverage across their offices and campuses, maintaining control over them as they do with current Wi-Fi networks. Sprint will work with enterprises and building owners to provide roaming onto the carrier network from WiMax femtocells or, in some cases, indoor Wi-Fi networks, he said. The small cells won't be needed in homes because the main network will be able to deliver good in-home coverage by itself, according to Gude. Earlier this week, Sprint started selling femtocells for its CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access) phone network in a trial rollout aimed at homes. The carrier and its partner, wireless broadband company Clearwire, will run Xohm on licensed spectrum but plan a business model far different from that of 3G mobile data offerings. Customers will be able to use Xohm for any type of application on the Internet, and client devices will be sold at retail stores without the subsidies mobile operators typically provide for phones. The technology could be included in a wide range of devices including handhelds, cameras, and even cars, the companies said. WiMax will go into future notebooks through Intel's Echo Peak chipset, a module for the company's next-generation Montevina platform for notebooks, which Intel announced Wednesday. Lenovo, Toshiba, Acer, and other manufacturers have said they will include WiMax in notebooks in 2008, according to Intel. Montevina notebooks are to hit the market in May. Although WiMax devices will be up against 3G products that are subsidized by carriers, the ability to buy the device separately from the service will be a real advantage, Insight64 analyst Nathan Brookwood said. Consumers don't like having to sign up for a two-year mobile plan as they typically do in the U.S. before they even know whether the carrier's service works in their homes. And notebooks, for example, sell without subsidies today, he pointed out. Xohm will be sold in a variety of ways, including monthly subscriptions, short on-the-spot purchases and "try-and-buy" offers with a period of free service, the companies said. They haven't disclosed pricing. Together, Sprint and Clearwire plan to reach 100 million U.S. residents next year, in about 30 markets including some small cities. Sprint plans to have trials in place in Chicago and the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area by the end of this year. Clearwire already has a pre-standard network with about 300,000 customers across the country and plans to deploy standard mobile WiMax in the Portland, Oregon, area in the first half of next year. It is running a trial there now.
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Fans of wireless internet access can now find their nearest wi-fi hotspot using their mobile phone.
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Intel Corp. expects its first-generation WiMax chips to spawn devices for wireless broadband end-users that cost less than $200 and won&#39;t require a visit
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Analysis Prospects bright in the Wi-Fi arena
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The networking firm's planned WiMax business is first-time broadband for the developing world, executives say.
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Wi-Fi enabled phones, like the iPhone, will drive demand  for fast wireless broadband networks like the ones cities want to build using Wi-Fi, say experts.
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Motorola is going after the emerging WiMax market in a big way. This week the company has been showing off its new hardware and software at WiMax World USA in Chicago -- one of six U.S. metropolitan areas in which Motorola will build the network infrastructure for Sprint Nextel&#39;s high-speed &quot;Xohm&quot; network.
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(InfoWorld) - It's been a year since a Mobile WiMax service was launched in Seoul and one of the world's most wired cities became one of the most wireless. The service is based on WiBro, a South Korean system that has become a part of the 802.16e Mobile WiMax standard. Whereas Mobile WiMax encompasses three frequency bands and several signal bandwidths, WiBro covers a subset of these and is limited to 2.3GHz and an 8.75MHz bandwidth per channel. To mark the launch of its WiBro service last year, KT Corp., the former state-run telecom carrier, took journalists on a trip around Seoul to try out the service in a WiMax-equipped bus. The reporters came away impressed, able to watch Internet video streaming while surfing the Web and video conferencing all while driving down the street. But what's the reality a year later? Last week I returned to Seoul to test the service again, this time outside the controlled environment of a promotional bus ride. Seoul is among the first cities in the world to have Mobile WiMax, so the results provide an indication of what the rest of the world can look forward to in the future. I accessed the service while on the subway, in a bus, and sitting in a coffee shop, and the results were as impressive as they were in last year's staged demonstration. This was especially true on the subway. Riding the number 2 line from Samseong Station to City Hall, the journey has both underground and overground sections. It connects the Teheran Valley high-tech district in the south, crosses the Han River and ends in the heart of Seoul's business and media district. Throughout the 30-minute journey I did not lose the signal once, although the speed did fluctuate somewhat. It would often drop when the train moved out of a station and increase again when it arrived at the next stop. Web and e-mail access worked so well that I decided to try something a little more demanding and accessed streaming video news clips from the Yahoo Japan portal. The clips are encoded at 300k bps (bits per second) and played without any problem, even while the train was in motion. Equally surprising was that my little experiment did not draw the attention of the passengers sitting next to me. In a country where most high-end cell phones have TV reception, watching streaming video on the train doesn't seem to impress anybody! I also accessed an FTP site in the U.S. from the train and started to download a 40M-byte video file. The software indicated a download speed of up to 660k bps in stations, and about 320k bps when the train was in motion. Access from a bus produced much the same results, and while surfing from a coffee shop I enjoyed a connection that hit those same top speeds and remained stable. Technically the WiBro service appears a success, at least if the results of my small trial are anything to go by, so it's a surprise that it has attracted less than 10,000 users in its first year of service. The service costs a flat fee of 16,000 won (US$17.60) per month for unlimited use during the current trial period, and KT even throws in a WiBro adapter, which plugs into laptops via the USB port. So what's holding people back? Until now a limited number of WiBro adapters has been available. said Yeom Woojong, a spokesman for KT in Seoul. But now more companies are offering them, he said, and KT expects to attract more subscribers as the year goes on. At the start of the year it set a target to have 200,000 WiBro users by the end of 2007, and it's sticking to that number, Yeom said. Â
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Here&#39;s one way to jumpstart WiMAX deployment: make a &quot;significant investment&quot; in a wireless broadband company that promises to use your technology and products.
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(InfoWorld) - Sprint Nextel's ambitious Xohm WiMax vision will be based on a radical change in the way users pay for the service compared with cellular plans. Users will sign up for wireless broadband for a day, a month, or a year without a contract tied to a specific device. Payment could be made via a credit card wirelessly. The pricing approach, described in broad strokes by Sprint chief technology officer Barry West Wednesday at WiMax World in Chicago, will be designed on the principle of "affordable" broadband and "around the needs of the individual," he said in an interview. That approach breaks down the concept now seen with cellular plans, in which users typically buy a two-year contract in part to subsidize the cost of a single mobile device that a user is locked into using. A Sprint spokesman explained that the proposed pricing will rely on subscriptions, but not contracts in the sense associated with typical cellular contracts. And the longer the subscription a customer buys, the cheaper the service will be, he said. West said Sprint will announce pricing early next year, but also said it will probably be based on tiers of service. The cost of devices, such as laptop cards able to transmit mobile WiMax, will approximate the cost of a 3G broadband laptop card today, he said. In response to a question from an audience member, West also said that Xohm will not be backed by what the industry calls service-level agreements, a kind of guarantee that a minimum bandwidth will be provided or the customer receives a refund. "We will give you a good experience, but not SLAs," West said. Several Sprint executives have described Xohm WiMax speeds that are expected to be 2Mbps to 4Mbps, although the technology is capable of 10Mbps. At a demonstration onboard a moving tour boat on the Chicago River Tuesday night using Motorola gear, mobile WiMax shared across 12 laptops and cell phones was clocked at 2.5Mbps downward. West noted that the demonstration was across only one channel, and that Sprint will be able to offer many channels to handle users at a single antenna site, offering plenty of bandwidth for many users. West, who calls himself a technology "pragmatist," said he does not envision any hidden technology bugaboos in the nationwide rollout of Xohm planned for next year. In the next three years, he has predicted 50 million devices, such as laptops and mobile phones, will be WiMax-certified. Getting the certification process for interoperability in order will be difficult, but he said that even if there are 100,000 different devices, it is conceivable all of them could be served from only 10 different chip sets. "That's not unmanageable," he said. By contrast, West said Xohm's biggest challenge will be servicing the needs of 210 million Internet users in the United States alone, and meeting their demands for access, applications, and services. In his keynote, West said some critics have already begun to question whether West's predictions for Xohm's growth are too ambitious. He said commercial rollouts are still on schedule for the second quarter of 2008, and work has begun on 10,000 base stations nationally, with 20,000 WiMax antennas. The initial rollout in Chicago and Baltimore/Washington in December is "pretty much on target," he added. As for competition, West said he doesn't see Verizon Wireless or AT&T.