It’s clear municipalilites can benefit from wireless broadband. Chosing the right model and executing it as a business tool rather than a political one seems to be the difference between success and failure. There’s no reason to believe that this would not apply to Wimax as well as WiFi.

The city of Milledgeville, Georgia has contracted Clearwire to deploy a municipal WiMAX network to provide city-wide wireless internet access. The service will be subscription-based, with a number of different service tiers available. Funding for the project is coming from a USD862,000 grant awarded to the city by the Georgia Technology Authority in 2006. (Telegeography)

We’ll be watching this one attentively.  Will the AT&T legal squad try to stop it?

With separate field test successes and roll out announcements coming from both Sprint and Clearwire, AT&T must beginning to believe that a nation wide WiMax really will work. A new network that is an open, wholesalable, mobile and a simple, dumb pipe could really throw a wrench into AT&T’s plans to roll out usage caps and overage charges, not to metion triple play. True to form, the Death Star has chosen to use to lawyering and lobbying at the FCC to kill competition rather than playing fair and competing.

The company has provided Ars with a copy of yesterday’s FCC filing in which AT&T argues that the deal needs more scrutiny. An AT&T spokesperson tells us that the company “does not fundamentally oppose the underlying transaction,” but it does say that Sprint and Clearwire “should be required to demonstrate that its merger serves the public interest just like any other providers would have to do.” Until that happens, the deal should be put on hold.(Ars Technica)

The FCC should dismiss this without fanfare. AT&T should be fined heavily for using the agency as part of a ploy to stifle competition.

The Wimax wait in the US seems to be endless.  Most of the action has been from small companies serving small markets.Every now and then a little deployment news from the big players drifts in. Such is the case today, and we are only too eager to share:

Portland in August:

Clearwire has been beta testing its Portland service for several weeks with “a very small group of Intel employees” (Intel is among Clearwire’s big financial backers, and the companies held a joint WiMAX trial in Hillsboro last year.)

The company tells me it will announce its rollout plans, including a Portland timetable, on its quarterly earnings call early next month. (Silicon Forest)

Baltimore in September:

Sprint’s first launch, under the name Xohm, will be in Baltimore in September, with switch-ons following in Chicago and Washington DC. Clearwire plans to launch in Portland, Oregon, in early 4Q-2008, with Atlanta, Las Vegas and Grand Rapids, Michigan, to follow. A report from Muniwireless.com, which quotes a conversation with Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff, says the telco is currently beta testing its Portland network. The Sprint-Clearwire partnership, which will operate under the Clearwire name, is not expected to achieve anything like nationwide WiMAX coverage until 2010 or 2011. (Telegeography)

We we hear more, we’ll add. C’mon guys, get to DFW, I’m dying to give AT&T DSL the boot!

While approval for the Sprint / Clearwire Wimax merger lingers in regulatory limbo, the two companies continue to activate service separately. Clearwire has announced new service in four more cities.

Portland, Oregon is about ready for testing right now while infrastructure is getting prepped for Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Grand Rapids in 2009. The Oregon area is already built out around 70%, so I’d gather that if the testing goes well, Oregonians will see service availability as early as year-end. (JK on the run)

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)

There’s a under reported problem with most of the tech media. They tend to live off of statements from pundits and press releases. Don’t blame them entirely, most have no technical education or background. The limits of their understanding are linked to using a computer, mobile phone and MP3 device. For the tech press, usually devices all three of these are Apple products, which also slants their viewpoint a bit.

In the US, there has been a relentless FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) campaign against Wimax that the tech media has been gulping down like free Starbucks and treats at  San Francisco press conference. The people pushing the FUD are the telcos, their suppliers, and their big investors. With FUD statements flowing so fluidly from these “informed sources” that tech sheep pack is only too happy to endlessly “report” the looming Wimax disaster.

The people pushing the FUD have tied their wireless broadband fortunes to a standard called LTE. LTE’s goals are lofty, and as envisoned LTE could have advantages over Wimax. LTE has two big disadvantages. While Wimax is being deployed,  LTE is still on the drawing board, and the spectrum LTE will be deployed on will not be available for another year.This could be a big advantage for Wimax, so the spin army is in full assault talking down Wimax. They’ve been so successful, that a coast to coast deployment by Sprint via the new Clearwire, was almost not funded.

Now lets look at a real world example of Wimax working well, right now, in the US. The company is Digital Bridge, and they have been offering good, reliable service in under served rural areas. With download speed that is competitive with DSL in most big cities, Digital Bridge is connecting new customers daily at a very healthy take rate. This is not what you would expect to see from a company that uses a unworkable technology.

Formed by a trio of Verizon executives in 2005, DigitalBridge seeks to bring WiMax to cities with populations of up to 150,000. At first, the company focused on bringing broadband to where it wasn’t. That included places like Appomattox, population 1,725, where cable and phone companies didn’t want to invest in building expensive landlines to reach faraway customers.

When it selects a locality, DigitalBridge installs broadcast stations atop cellular towers and tall buildings, which are connected by fiber cable to a regional Internet provider. The stations send a signal as far as three miles. Customers rent a device that looks like a modem and plug it into an electric outlet and into their computer.

DigitalBridge markets its service as BridgeMaxx, starting at $25 per month. It first moved into Rexburg, Idaho, before spreading to other cities and states. DigitalBridge operates in 14 localities, marketing the product through newspapers, radio and sponsorships, including a rodeo in Twin Falls, Idaho. It has a network of 20,000 customers that is growing by about 2,000 a month.(Washington Post)

Right now US auto sales are flagging with the high cost of fuel. Chrysler is not immune to the effect though they are probably not as impacted as Ford or GM as SUVs, even Jeep, is not a huge segment of their sales. Even so, Chrysler is offering UConnect in future cars.

The concept of UConnect is to provide a ‘wireless’ car which assumes WiFi and Bluetooth enabled assets in the cabin. There are auto uptrippers that do this today installing anything from car pcs to Wifi and 1000w amps.

Washington, June 23 : American automobile manufacturer Chrysler has plans to equip its cars with a system that will enable people to surf the Internet while driving.

The UConnect Web system is what the company says can bring wireless Internet access to cars’ dashboards.

Frank Klegon, the company’s vice-president, says that they wants to gain a reputation for high-tech cars.

“In today’s market, Chrysler’s mission is to bring innovation to market more quickly,” Wired News quoted Klegon as saying.

Here’s an assessment –

Boon

• If there was ever a reason to implement WiMax this is it. Wifi is ok but the ranges are too short in most cases. One ends up with a lot of dead spots or deploys hundreds of AP’s. WiMax with its longer reach reduces both problems.
• Real Time traffic reporting. Done right this could be a fuel saver. If the developers work with the Garmins and TomTom’s of the world alternate routing would help alleviate the effects of traffic. No it won’t eliminate it.
• Knee drivers disappear. You know this type, cell phone in one hand, cup of coffee in the other. Last I heard we haven’t sprouted a third hand so they have to be using their knees.
• This stuff will be cheap. Volume is the name of the game in electronics. A million units spreads R&D. Not only that but what a hacker dream. “Dear I am going to the electronics store…”, which just happens to be Bill’s Wrecker and Salvage.
• Death of “Are we there yet” disease. What better distraction for the kiddies than a live internet connection?
• The third party marketing opportunities I expect to be viewed as endless.

Bane

• Just what we need, another distraction for the driver.
• The automobile as living room experience I have never quite understood. I take a very euro view to driving. Its to get you there, not lull you to sleep.
• First introduction cost will probably be high. Not only that with high fuel costs can one get a full utilization out of the entertainment value of the system.

As usual this development is a two edged sword. With a little common sense applied it can be a great tool to improve fuel efficiency, improve driver performance in strange locations, etc. If it is going to be treated as a gimmick well, that’s a waste.

HT: Big News Network

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.

Competitive pressure may be ready to break the wireless cartel’s hold on mobile broadband service by next year. Price / performance pressure should mount when T Mobile 3G and Xohm WiMax services come to market. While 3G is not broadband by a modern rich media measure, it does offer a real improvement over what is available to far too many Americans that are not served by fixed line broadband today. If Xohm performs as advertised, 3G may only be able to compete on price. The bodes well for the consumer who has been at the mercy of the cartel for far too long.

Thus by early 2009, the U.S. will have four national mobile networks:

• AT&T Mobility (formerly Cingular) using W-CDMA with HSDPA and eventually HSUPA
• T-Mobile USA deploying W-CDMA with HSDPA and then HSUPA
• Verizon using CDMA 2000 EVDO Rev A and later Rev B
• Sprint using CDMA 2000 EVDO Rev A and later Rev B (and partnered with four major cable companies)

In addition, WiMAX should be available in all major markets with the balance of a national footprint built out during 2009 and 2010; i.e., Sprint XOHM (pronounced zoam) usingWiMAX ( News - Alert) at 2.5 GHz in partnership with Clearwire

Four competitors is a magic number. One operator is a monopoly. Two or three operators typically form a stable oligopoly. There’s competition and evolution, but it’s controlled — no one goes bankrupt, no one takes over. However, markets with four or more viable competitors go wild, to the benefit of consumers. We’ve seen this effect in the evolution of mobile voice services in many countries around the world. Markets with four or more viable competitors experience hyper competition. (TMCnet)

Well many expected Google to be the anthesis of the Telcos, swoop in buy up the 700mhz block and sell bandwidth subsidized by wireless ad revenue. Well that didn’t pan out so well. Now Ars Technica is suggesting that the new Clearwire consortium might be that ‘ThirdPipe’. –

A lengthy document filed this week with the FCC asks for permission to merge the 2.5GHz spectrum assets of Sprint and Clearwire into "New Clearwire," the company backed by Sprint, Clearwire, Intel, Time Warner, Google, and Bright House. In the filing, Clearwire makes the case that it will provide true "third pipe" Internet access to home and mobile users at speeds of 6Mbps (and 3Mbps uplink).

The companies involved know how to make the right promises:

• "New Clearwire will permit consumers to use any lawful device that they want so long as it is compatible with and not harmful to the WiMAX network
• "New Clearwire also will permit consumers to download and use any software applications, content, or services they desire, subject only to reasonable network management practices and law enforcement and public safety considerations
• "New Clearwire will offer non-exclusive wholesale access to its network
• "New Clear wire will deploy an advanced mobile WiMAX broadband network that will cover up to 140 million people in the United States in 30 months"

Ars quotes that Clearwire has filed a request with the FCC that they be permitted to logically merge several bands from an operatonal perspective. Assuming this happens and the FCC relents this might be the engine that gives Verizon competition to their 700mhz acquisition.

Linky.