US mobile Wimax goes live! In Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Another American Wimax first happens in a place under the duopoly’s radar. Not coming form Sprint, Clearwire, or another “big name”, but rather tiny Digital Bridge is the service provider. The initial offering is not particularly fast, but in a race with the typical 3G or EVDO offerings, it’s a clear winner.

The service costs $39 a month for a one-year contract for 1 Mbps download and 256 Kbps upload, and includes the rent of a WiMAX card. The company has also tested speeds higher than that and hopes to offer higher speeds later for a higher price, Soscia said. Like cable modem, users share the bandwidth and so performance is to a certain degree predicated on how many people are using the service in a particular area at the same time.

Soscia would not say how many square miles the network covered nor how many towers it used, but said that in other deployments they typically saw a range of 1.5 miles up to 4 or 5 miles per tower.

After providing WiMAX service to a number of cities in Idaho and Montana, the company had intended to provide WiMAX service in Jackson, and pointed to the area’s demographics as a reason to roll out Mobile WiMAX there. (Beta News)