Whither WiMax in Australia?
There now seems to be hope for people that aren’t fond of paying through the nose for 3G wireless and want higher rates than the 3G network or existing Unwired network provides.
One of the most touted new features of the new Intel Mobile 4 Express series chipsets is the inclusion of WiMax (a.k.a. IEEE 802.16e) in the core platform. As yet, we haven’t seen much use for it in Australia, but is that changing?
There was an interesting story about Unwired’s WiMax rollout recently. According to ZDNet, Unwired is narrowing in on a list of suppliers for its national WiMax rollout – although when we say “national” in respect to Unwired it mostly means the capital cities.
It has been a long time coming, in any case – Unwired has had the WiMax spectrum since 2005, and has been talking up the technology for nearly as long as the company has been in existence.
Nonetheless, there now seems to be hope for people that aren’t fond of paying through the nose for 3G wireless and want higher rates than the 3G network or existing Unwired network provides.
Unwired is saying that WiMax users will get 2mbps minimum, with 4-6mbps expected. In fact, just last week it ran a demonstration in Sydney that’s said to have clocked up to 13mbps downloads – though of course that was a demonstration, and not a true indication of what kind of performance we’ll get once thousands of users start sharing the spectrum. In any case, it’s not ADSL 2+, but it’s better than 3G users are getting.
Of course, Unwired isn’t the only company working with WiMax. Internode, Austar, Allegro Networks, Emerge Technologies and Digital River Networks all have small scale and trial implementations up and running, though the lack of a wider rollout from any of these telcos does make me wonder if the efficacy of WiMax is anywhere near what its initial backers claim.
There’s also the NBN (National Broadband Network) coming down the pike. Although we don’t know plan specifics, if Terria wins the bid, I’d say there’s a better than even chance that WiMax will be used to deliver services in regional areas, since putting up a tower is much cheaper than laying cable.
Optus, in its now defunct OPEL joint venture was planning to use WiMax to deliver regional broadband, and there’s a good chance that plan will be resurrected should Terria (which is dominated by Optus) build the NBN. If Telstra should win, I’m not so sure. Telstra might decide that HSDPA 3G is all the bush ever needs.
Quick links
Before I go, there are a couple of other stories that I thought were worth linking to this week.
Anandtech has an excellent discussion of PC power usage and the different types of power supplies – it really explodes some of the major computer power supply myths (and is pretty good ammunition next time you go to your computer repair guy and they pull out the old “you need a bigger power supply” standby excuse to explain why your PC isn’t working).
Also, Ars Technica has some of the preliminary details on iPoque’s latest Internet usage survey. The short version: P2P is actually decreasing as a proportion of all Internet usage, but direct downloads like Rapidshare are way, way up.
Other Blog Entries written by Nathan Taylor:
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