Carriers have barely rolled out their new third-generation wireless networks, and they're already talking about the fourth generation, which could offer affordable high-speed Internet access for consumer electronics devices on the go.
Imagine a day when parents in California attending their daughter's soccer game can stream all the action live directly from their camcorder to grandma and grandpa in Florida, or a day when you can instantly download the latest U2 album onto your iPod.
Executives at Intel, Samsung Electronics, Motorola and Sprint Nextel say that day is coming soon, using an Internet Protocol-based network technology called WiMax that will quadruple download speeds over current cellular technology and offer cost-effective chipsets that can be embedded in everything from cell phones to digital cameras to MP3 music players.
"The Internet is going airborne," Motorola CEO Ed Zander said during a press conference earlier this week. "If you get outside the U.S., you'll see it's already happening in places like South Korea."
Earlier this week, Sprint became the first major U.S. wireless carrier to announce it will use WiMax to build its next-generation wireless network. Intel, Samsung and Motorola--all longtime supporters of WiMax technology--are working with Sprint to provide the infrastructure equipment used to build the network and provide the chipsets, handsets and consumer electronics devices that will access it.
Sprint expects to spend $3 billion over the next two years on building the network, which will go live in late in 2007. The company will use its existing 2.5GHz spectrum, half of which it acquired from the merger with Nextel, to deliver the new service.
While Sprint had been testing a slew of other technologies--including Flash OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing), a technology developed by Qualcomm's Flarion--to build this new network, it ultimately chose WiMax. The decision will likely make the technology a front-runner for other 4G network deployments that could be launched in the next few years.
Currently, players such as satellite TV providers and cable operators are bidding in a Federal Communications Commission auction for wireless licenses in the 1.7GHz to 2.1GHz spectrum, which, like the 2.5GHz spectrum, is ideal for WiMax.
A new company called Clearwire, started by mobile-industry billionaire Craig McCaw, is already using a flavor of WiMax to deliver its wireless broadband service. The company, which recently raised US$900 million, is also competing for spectrum in the current FCC auction.
"This is really the first big pickle out of the jar for WiMax," said Craig Mathias, a principal analyst at Farpoint Group. "It really legitimizes WiMax with big carriers such as Sprint throwing (their) weight behind it."
WiMax is a packet-based technology that's very similar to Wi-Fi, a wireless technology used in coffee shops, airports and other public areas to provide wireless Internet access. WiMax has often been called "Wi-Fi on steroids" because, while being similar to Wi-Fi, it actually provides users with slightly higher speeds over much longer distances than Wi-Fi. While Wi-Fi radios typically reach only a few hundred feet, WiMax radios can transmit data up to one to two miles under certain conditions.
"Wi-Fi is a hot-spot technology," said Rick Barton, director of sales for the Sprint Nextel account at Samsung Telecommunications America. "And when you move between hot spots, connections can be dropped, so you can't access it in a moving car, for example. Wi-Fi isn't really meant for mobility. But you really don't have that problem with WiMax."
In laboratory tests, WiMax supports peak data speeds of about 20Mbps (megabits per second). But average speeds in the "real world" are somewhere between 1Mbps and 4Mbps, comparable to what's offered through Wi-Fi, but much faster than the 400Kbps (kilobits per second) to 700Kbps downloads available using current 3G cellular technology such as Evolution-Data Optimized, or EV-DO. Sprint currently uses EV-DO to deliver its mobile broadband service today.
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