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.

Sometimes its just good to see some common sense being used in the telecom market. 6 firms are pooling patents in a hope that by doing so they can share costs and avoid IP litigation. My gosh if this catches on pretty soon we might see a free use band in the wireless spectrum –

Six big technology companies are spearheading a plan to jointly license patents that cover the wireless technology called WiMAX hoping to limit royalty rates that could deter customers from using it.

The participants are Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp., Samsung Electronics Co., Sprint Nextel Corp., Alcatel-Lucent and Clearwire Corp., according to people familiar with the situation and a document outlining the group’s plans.

They have scheduled a conference call Monday to announce an organization, the Open Patent Alliance, to gather rights to WiMAX-related patents and license them to makers of computers, networking devices and other products, these people said.

Linky.

There is a Dutch outfit that has relaunched a long range WiFi system they they have branded Max-Fi. At 2km the throughput is still get 2Mbps. Not bad for what is nothing more than 802.11 with attenuated modulation.

According to the Mfr the deploy cost is much lower than WiMax. More details here.

New research shows that younger people like to use use their mobile device as a second window into their online lives and personal computer. It’s not just the young. Go to any office park eatery at noon and you’ll see lots of smart phones and crackberries getting a workout from middle aged as well as youthful users.

A report from In-Stat points out that millennials, the generation aged 8 to 27, use their mobile phones to access their social networks wherever they are.

This is great news for a variety of companies attempting to bring PC content to the mobile. As content is pulled to mobile devices, publishers will pay to make sure it arrives in a readable format and quickly enough to satiate user demand, meaning content delivery networks, providers of transcoding services and services that render PC content accessible to mobile phones could benefit. (GigaOm)

Now, here’s an idea: Build devices to use an open pipe (Clearwire?). The open source handsets you will use have VPN capability, with VoIP and unified messaging. It all fits neatly only one screen with a single interface. If you have a Gmail account, you already unified messaging capabilities with single login. Just do a handset interface. No need to leave the “phone mode” and hop over to the “internet mode” or “text mode”. No trying to keep track of the various nickel and dime and dollar charges for each, you just rent the pipe and you use it for whatever app you like. It could happen in the next year on Wimax or something like it. If however, we rely only on AT&T and Verizon , it will only happen in time for the next generation to use it.

Ques: What is the number of free AT&T hotspots? Yep. Nationwide. This includes Starbucks and Barnes & Noble as well. Now the ‘free’ Is targeted at iPhone users. But with a little tech jockeying anyone with a WiFi enabled laptop can too. LifeHacker provides a mini-HOWTO here.

This is actually good news for the consumer. It will be interesting to see how the Wifi — EVDO — WiMax battle plays out. Verizon right now is dong a big push for EVDO using a ‘WiFi captive’ marketing campaign. Expect fur to fly in the next couple of years.