Disaster. Miserable failure. Mired in opportunistic hype. Those were just a few of the descriptors Garth Freeman, the CEO of Australian company Buzz Broadband, recently used to characterize the next-generation wireless technology, WiMax.
Based on a report from Commsday, an Australian telecom publication, things have not gone smoothly for the (former) WiMax operator since it first embraced the technology a little more than a year ago. Freeman made this fact abundantly clear to the international audience that assembled at a recent WiMAX conference in Bangkok.
WiMax, also known as 802.16d, is one of the leading next-generation wireless standards. Intel and Sprint Nextel, among other companies, have invested billions of dollars to advance the technology, which promises data transmission speeds of up to 70Mbps across distances as large as tens of miles. Wi-Fi, by contrast, maxes out at 74Mbps but only over distances of about 100 feet or less, while currently-available third-generation (3G) cellular technologies deliver about 2-3Mbps over half a mile to a mile.
After warning the audience that WiMax "may not work" and that it was still "mired in opportunistic hype," he proceeded to slam particular shortcomings of the technology, saying its non-line of sight performance was "non-existent" beyond just 2 kilometers from the base station. He also said that indoor performance decayed at just 400m and that latency rates -- a measure of the delay before any given data transmission begins -- reached as high as 1000 milliseconds.
That latter trait, in particular, earned the wrath of Freeman since it basically rendered many Internet applications, like VoIP, virtually useless. (A one-second lag is sufficient to make voice conversations extremely frustrating for most users.) Unfortunately for Buzz, the company has used VoIP as one of its main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent services.
Commsday has more on Freeman's anti-WiMax tirade, for those interested, but this certainly doesn't paint a sunny picture for other WiMax supporters. The big backer of the technology here in the U.S. is Sprint, which is planning a $5 billion dollar buildout over the next few years. Both AT&T and Verizon Wireless have opted for another next generation wireless technology known as LTE, which won't be deployed for at least another year.
As we reported earlier, Sprint and Clearwire -- another regional WiMax start-up -- recently called off a tentative alliance that would have had the two companies splitting the cost of building that nationwide network. That deal would have also allowed eventual customers to easily roam between the two networks and, at the same time, lessen the financial burden on Sprint and Clearwire. Now Sprint is left shouldering most, if not all, of that build out cost, as Intel and other hardware manufacturers start releasing WiMax-enabled laptops and cellphones in the coming months.
That's already plenty to worry about already. So if we're now talking about serious technical issues related to wireless technology -- as Freeman implies -- WiMax could very well continue to flounder in the near term, unless someone with some serious bank steps in and helps. Intel?
[Via Commsday]
See Also:
- Sprint/Clearwire Breakup Casts Further Doubts on WiMax's Future
- Rumor: Intel to Reunite Sprint and Clearwire With $2B WiMax Infusion
- Sprint and Clearwire Call it Quits on WiMax Partnership
- Marvell's Super Speedy 802.11n Chipset Leaves WiMax in the Dust
- IDF: Intel CEO Says "Wimax Is Moving to Mainstream"
