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Sean Maloney, executive vice president and general manager of Intel
Corp.’s Mobility Group, foreground, talks to Bernard Van Baalen,
captain of the SS Vlissingen, from a WiMax hotspot in Rotterdam at the
Intel Developer’s Forum in San Francisco this summer.
SAN FRANCISCO – On a stormy day at an Argentine agricultural school,
Maria del Carmen Villar stood in front of a camera that streamed her
image over the Internet to a conference here – more than 6,500 miles
away.
Such
an event is hardly unusual in this era of broadband and webcams, but it
was a milestone for the Instituto Agropecuario de Monte, a rural school
that until recently had only slow dial-up connections that were bogged
down by text, let alone video.
The school in San Miguel del
Monte, 90 miles outside Buenos Aires, is one of the first test sites
for a wireless broadband technology called WiMax. Now, the school’s 250
students use the Internet for research in classrooms and in the fields.
They’ve even collaborated online with schools as far away as Paris.
“WiMax
is definitely changing how we do education,” del Carmen Villar, the
school’s director, said as students worked on PCs in the background.
The demonstration showed WiMax can fulfill at least some of its many promises over the years.
It’s
been hyped as an affordable way to bring the Internet to poorer and
rural regions around the world, break the broadband duopoly of cable
and phone companies and eventually cover entire countries with seamless
high-speed Internet access for viewing video, making phone calls and
completing other data-intensive tasks.
Trouble is, despite years
of promises, WiMax has yet to move beyond trials and carefully scripted
demonstrations, including those at the Intel Developer Forum.
Skeptics
question whether all the promises can be fulfilled and suggest that
other technologies can solve the same problems sooner.
“Any new
technology that comes out takes a while before it either fails or
becomes broadly established. In that period, people can say it’s been
overblown,” said Sean Maloney, general manager of the mobility group at
Intel Corp., one of WiMax’s biggest cheerleaders. “I don’t think that
applies to WiMax.”
WiMax – short for Worldwide Interoperability for
Microwave Access – is expected in two flavors. The first, known as
fixed wireless, is similar to the wireless standard known as Wi-Fi, but
on a much larger scale and at faster speeds. A nomadic version would
keep WiMax-enabled devices connected over large areas much like today’s
cell phones.
Supporters say WiMax would complement and not
compete with existing technologies such as Wi-Fi, the wireless
networking technology now available through countless hotspots in
parks, coffee shops, airports and other locales around the world.
While
Wi-Fi typically provides local network access for around a few hundred
feet with speeds of up to 54 megabits per second, a single WiMax
antenna is expected to have a range of up to 40 miles with speeds of 70
megabits per second or more.
As such, WiMax can bring the underlying Internet connection needed to service local Wi-Fi networks.
The
fixed wireless thrust of WiMax allows some portability within hotspots,
but its main focus is on bypassing the last mile of wires that’s been
critical in connecting people to the Internet. Today, that has mostly
been the domain of telephone and cable companies that have existing
pipes to homes and businesses.
Still, even supporters say WiMax
isn’t likely to displace DSL or cable broadband services anytime soon.
Rather, Maloney said, its biggest impact is where that infrastructure
does not yet exist.
That was the case at the Argentine school,
which was simply too remote for regular broadband. In fact, the country
has been far behind the rest of the world in high-speed Internet
access, said Ignacio Nores, marketing manager at Ertach, the Argentine
service provider running the WiMax trial.
Maloney said the initial deployments of WiMax will largely be in fast-growing, emerging market economies.
Progress is being made. Late last year, a standard was approved. Now, the WiMax Forum, which will certify various vendors’
offerings for interoperability, counts 343 companies as members and has started testing products expected for release next year.
By
standardizing the technology, supporters hope to create a flurry of
competition among vendors, driving down prices and preventing a single
company from dominating, said Charles Golvin, a Forrester Research
analyst.
The number of trials has ballooned to more than 100, up from 50 just months ago.
AT&T
Corp., which is starting its third WiMax trial in October, sees an
opportunity to save money on the fees it pays local telephone companies
– some $8 billion a year – to access the 94 percent of office buildings
in the United States that do not connect directly to its network.
Yet
roadblocks remain, including the lack of international agreement on
what part of the wireless spectrum to use. For now, some WiMax trials
have been using unlicensed frequencies, but interference could
downgrade performance – a big turnoff for major companies running
critical applications.
“You don’t have any legal recourse against people who are essentially interfering with your service.” Golvin said.
WiMax’s
roaming thrust faces even greater challenges. Ratification of the
standard isn’t expected for up to two months, and testing of equipment
isn’t expected until at least 2007.
To seamlessly cover large
areas, WiMax has to gain the support of large carriers – including
cellular phone operators that have invested billions of dollars in
other technologies known as 3G, or third generation.
“It’s a
wonderful technology on paper, but in reality you need the service
providers – the Vodaphones, the Cingulars around the world – to do
something,” said Michel Mayer, chief executive of Freescale
Semiconductor Inc., which was spun off last year from cell phone maker
Motorola Corp.
For either flavor of WiMax, Golvin said, there’s
still the question of how far is the gap between the promise and the
real-world delivery.
But carriers are careful not to completely discount WiMax.
“We
do think it’s an interesting technology and concept, but there are no
plans to deploy,” said Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon
Wireless. “WiMax is the step beyond a twinkle in an engineer’s eye.”
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