Thursday, March 06, 2008

WiMax Hype

Gary Kim has a post about the limitations of WiMax. As I am fond of saying: Physics is still physics. You can only get so much MB per MHz. Period.

For all those who think Wireless is going to be transport for IPTV, I say HA! Aloha Networks sold off its 700 MHz spectrum after its TV over 700 trials failed. WISPs are already seeing that streaming video can clog a network - fast. Now there's some proof.

For those of you convinced that WiMAX is going to be a great platform to compete with cable modem and Digital Subscriber Line services, you might want to take another look. ABI Research Senior analyst Ken Hyers says recent conversations with major wireless carriers confirmed that "the presence of as few as five users simultaneously receiving unicast content from a single cellular base station carrier band can seriously degrade data access for those subscribers."

While everyone says WiMax will have more bandwidth (how?), it now has been shown to have interference issues within the C-band with satellite. [see SUIRG report]

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