Jacob J. Francis
Virginia Tech
Electrical Engineering Class of 2008

Pardon me but excuse me apparently you don’t have any idea what being a Blogger in addition to all the other aspects of Internet Marketing is like. Quite often this stuff is emailed in from a Blackberry, etc.

The nature of a Blog is to be impartial with one person or groups unique view into a specific aspect of a niche. We also have a lot of blogs to keep updated like our Dallas Marketing Blog and others.

While there are plenty of people who can write better then me or the rest of our staff few understand the subject matter the way we do. If you are to stuck on proper English to learn from people who know what they are talking about but may lack some writing skills (or more accurately the time to worry about them) that is your cross to bare.

We write here to do two things

1. To be found by the Search Engines and we do very well at it

2. To convey what we know about technical issues in a way so that a less informed person can UNDERSTAND THEM.

In short your critique is not something we will loose sleep over, if you would like your readers to UNDERSTAND WiMax and its’ impact this article can help with that, if you or your readers are so uptight that you might tweak out because we used “then” when we should have used “than” or because we used a comma wrong, wrote a run on sentence or mispelled a word that seems more your problem then ours.

Oh and I misspelled the word misspelled above on purpose just to jack with you ;>)

Thanks for your input but jeeze dude lighten up a bit! This is just a blog run by a few Mensa members that don’t spell very well,

Still, thank you for your opinion on the future of WiMAX.

I recently noticesd that Intel, Microsoft and Dell were lobbying for the opening of more unlicenced spectrum in the white spaces between broadcasting channels. The FCC seems ready to make this available. Will this move in 2009 increase WiMax deployment and if so, how soon do you think we could see new wireless devices being used in these “white spaces”?

We intend to only one big City (Harare)
We want one base controller,5 base stations, and all the other components I might not know. Please we are in a hurry.

WiMAX, here I come!

Your question assumes that the only demand for WiMax is mobile technology. Of course even answered that way the reason is simple. Compare this to residential home construction with an old house that a person wants to make a lot larger and fix a lot of prolems with along with upgrading many of the apliances etc. Most of the time (not all) tearing down a house and starting from scratch of lesser cost and produces a better result then doing an addition and remodle

In much the same way trying to keep existing users of the current wireless networks happy (which means any upgrade must be “backwards compatable”) and then make older equipment work beyound its’ orginal intention and capacity may be “possible” but will in the end not work as well and cost a lot more in both money and lost subscribers due to down time over a multi year upgrade.

So that is half the answer but the larger answer lies in the fact that WiMax will have a bigger infulence on FIXED APLICATIONS during its’ initial acceptence rather then mobile applications. Through out the US and much of the developed world there are countless potential customers begging for broadband internet of any kind. They are willing to pay and ready to buy but no service is available.

The cost to deploy fiber or create remote pops (points of presence) to these areas is cost prohibitive. In other words sure the phone or cable company could roll out broadband over copper or fiber to a rural county in middle America and sure they would get 50% or more conversion to customers but the total number of customers is so small and the cost of the network deployment so expensive that it might take two decades or MORE for the provider to break even. Of course that assumes no other competitor figures out how to compete for those customers and takes away some of the market.

Contrast this with a WiMax deployment. WiMax can be transmited over 30 miles which means each tower is 30 miles of cable you don’t have to burry. In the best ground with the fewest problems cable will cost about 5 dollars a foot to burry and in many areas more like 12-15 a foot. I am about to make it worse because that price is not for the cable just to burry it.

In short you can build a LOT of towers for one mile of burried cable so it will cost a LOT LESS to deploy broadband internet to rural users via WiMax then to do so with wire line service.

Of course once said deployments begin in earnest the economy of scale takes over and WiMax gear will drop in price (this is already occuring) so the next logical conclusion is to use this new equipment for mobile metro networks to deal with the capacity and service issues that are already becoming a major issue in many areas.

I hope that helps to answer your question. Let me say it was indeed a very good question to ask,

Jack Spirko