WiMax, we barely knew ye
You know for a fact that I am chomping at the bit to get my grubby little digits on WiMax. Wide ranging, all over the place, wireless broadband with relatively low latency? Depending on that last one, it’d definitely have me switching off Time Warner’s RoadRunner (oh company of the worst customer service ever).
But wait, what’s this? Sprint may end up not doing their WiMax rollout after all? That’d be awful. Here was something genuinely interesting being done by a telco - especially given their business model for it, moving on from the standard screw your customers with a crazy contract business model that all the telco’s currently hawk their wares with. With a person centric focus that allowed any WiMax capable devices they owned onto the network - if done well and right it could cause a whole new industry to sprout up of personal connected devices. Granted, truly disruptive technologies are pretty hard to spot in advance, but this one looks like a real contender.
Hopefully whoever is in charge won’t decide to continue focusing on new and innovative ways to screw their customers without investing anything in the infrastructure and instead keep plugging along with this plan. Sure it’s a lot of money and it is risky, but it could be a huge competitive edge for the company if it lives up to the hype.
At least the United Nations is turning out in favour of WiMax. I have no idea how much that impacts the world, practically, but it is, at the least a nice gesture in favour. I’m ready, let’s go.
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Didnt i read they were rolling it into 3G in some questionable way? lemme look for that…
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:20 pm
oh right…. slashdot posted a link to this article: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39290156,00.htm
looks like they want it to be part of the 3G family of standards.
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Yeah, I think they were touting it as 4G for a bit there, but being in 3G probably helps acceptance more. They could call it 0G for all I care, as long as they roll it out to NYC quick, fast in a hurry. Flavor vision’s getting blurry!
October 22nd, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Who among us wasn’t chomping at the bit to sign up for this? I can’t wait to stick it to all the telcos and their closed models. I want Skype and Gizmo on my N810 using WiMAX. I could do without a cell phone very happily if this were available today. I guess if Sprint doesn’t do it, maybe Google will get that chunk of 700 MHz spectrum and go it alone. I just don’t want to wait that long . . .
October 22nd, 2007 at 8:23 pm
I am with you, Curt! Although, I admit, that I would still want a phone. :) I’ve definitely had enough of this waiting around. Daddy’s not going to be happy if Spring calcels XOHM. Grr…
November 9th, 2007 at 7:33 am
[...] you know how there’s all this question going on with the whole WiMax thing? More bad news has come up - Sprint just gave Clearwire the boot on what was going to be their [...]
February 19th, 2008 at 7:35 am
[...] good times. Come on! I thought that my WiMax dreams were dead. Dead, dead, dead. Happily, it seems that Clearwire and Sprint have gotten back together thanks to [...]