Why Wimax still matters

It’s time to put on my curmudgeonly geek hat for a few minutes and take issue all of the disinformation that has become so mainstream in the zeitgeist this year. I’ll call it Seinfeld spinning after the popular TV show about “nothing”. It’s not just in tech. For example: we have successful political campaigns about nothing, climatic science panics about nothing, and “reality entertainment” that has nothing to do with reality holding the attention of the masses in our society. It’s been the same for the media calling for the death of a technology’s deployment before it’s birth. The big bad Seinfeld spin of Wimax is about nothing.

While fund managers and analysts have successfully spun Wimax as a failure, there is a long and growing list of successful deployments overseas. Most of theses deployments have been off the radar of fund managers and the big US wireless carrier / telco monopolies and the tech news media. The bigger equipment providers (with the notable exception of Motorola who is supporting both LTE and Wimax) have chosen sides favoring LTE over Wimax in a continued support for walled garden wireless business models. The FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) campaign waged against Wimax by the telcos and investment community has been relentless. Never the less, Clearwire is launching in Major cities this fall. In many cases the relatively slow download speeds offered will be competitive with fixed broadband in many locales.

The big deal about Wimax is three fold: 1) It’s open, 2) It’s a second or third broadband option, and 3) It offers mobility. If you use boradband or a wireless device, Wimax will change your world.

Industry insider Mari Silby offers some insightful observations about how world changing it could be:

What should matter to consumers:

• Per-use payment options - No requirement to pay a WiMAX monthly service fee if you’re only going to connect once or twice a month
• Handsets don’t have to be subsidized, meaning you’ll be able to buy anything WiMAX-certified at retail and automatically have Internet access
• The new Clearwire service will use mobile WiMAX instead of fixed WiMAX, which means you can literally stay connected while moving at high speed down a highway (Side note: Interestingly, I heard major pessimism around mobile WiMAX from one large industry analyst firm earlier this year. Premature reaction?)
• Nationwide network - before the new investors got on board, it wasn’t clear if WiMAX could scale beyond a few metro areas; now a nationwide build-out is assumed
• “[Some] observers see WiMAX silicon getting small and cheap enough to find its way into a wide range of consumer gear, such as digital cameras — which might also have their broadband connectivity built into the purchase price, like Amazon’s Kindle book reader.” -Sidecut Reports (Zatz Not Funny)

So, the next time you hear a talking head on CNBC running down Wimax, remember. It’s just another kind of Seinfeld episode, about nothing.