Former Australian WiMAX operator: “WiMAX may not work”
- March 24th, 2008
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- 2 Comments
The CEO of Buzz Broadband just shuttered his WiMAX network and, in a conference in Bangkok, called the technology worthless. He complains that out of line-of-sight with the antenna WiMAX degrades horribly, resulting in network failures. He is now using a number of standards including TD-CDMA to get about 10Mbps and will not be using WiMAX.
Gulp! And we just bought a huge transmitter for the whole family.
Australian WiMAX pioneer trashes technology as “miserable failure” [Commsday]
This post, and the underlying article, are just not clear or detailed enough to make the criticism interesting or useful. If there are latency issues (as alleged), that’s notable and a problem. But the line-of-sight problem (which would be very serious too) can’t really be assessed without understanding what frequency spectrum was being used (3.5? 2.5? 1.9) and what the cell density was. Bring on some gory details and then we can all make our own judgments.
Mobile WiMAX falls short of expectations?
It has been reported that “Dispute erupts over bad WiMax performance” based on the report by an Australian WiMAX operator. The report cites of loss of service with direct connectivity beyond 2 Km and inbuilding coverage of only a few hundred meters from the base station.
WiMAX technology has proved itself in more than 300 trials and a number of commercial launches. Some of the recent ones are the QMAX harbour area WiMAX in Singapore, Wateen telecom in Pakistan, Tata Indicom in India and a number of operators in Latin America.
A network can not defy the laws of physics and the link performances need to be built in. First of all, the higher frequency ranges used in Australia ( nearing the extended c-band at 3.6 GHz are no help as the loss increases with square of frequency as well as distance. Secondly WiMAX base stations come in different versions such as carrier grade, Micro base stations and Pico base stations. These are with different power levels and can not deliver more than their scheduled range.
Hence it all boils down to sectorization and base station densities.
http://www.wimax-home.com