Behind the push for WiMAX

We’ve been told for the past two years how much better WiMAX is than Wi-Fi. It has a potential range of 50 miles (far superior than the paltry Wi-Fi range of a few hundred feet), and it is all IP, making WiMAX easier to manage and secure using the same network and infrastructure that’s already in place.

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But is it possible there’s another reason carriers such as Sprint and Clearwire are pushing it? Here’s the quote from a Motorola exec that finally lit the lightbulb over my head:

“WiMAX is a licensed spectrum,” says Juan Santiago, senior director of product and strategy at Motorola. “It is a service provider who will provide it. You can’t provide it yourself.” Bingo.

As a licensed spectrum, that must mean someone had to pay for it. Why, that could mean they might make me pay for it — by the minute, the hour, the megabyte? What do you think?

“But,” you might say, “prices will fall as WiMAX network providers face competition.” What competition? It looks like a closed club to me.

According to research from telecom analysis firm Maravedis, Sprint and Clearwire own the lion’s share of the spectrum allocated for WiMAX. Sprint owns 268 protected service areas and Clearwire owns 59. BellSouth is third with 36. Meanwhile Motorola, the equipment supplier to both, just bought Clearwire’s equipment manufacturer and Clearwire subsidiary NextNet.

And what about Intel? Why is it so gung ho on WiMAX? Gung ho to the point where Intel Capital gave Craig McCaw’s company, Clearwire, $600 million to accelerate the deployment of a national WiMAX network. The answer here is obvious. Sometimes you must push planned obsolescence along or folks might get too comfortable with what they already have.

With a Wi-Fi chip set already embedded in every Intel notebook, there is one less reason to upgrade unless there is something better. And don’t forget the handset manufacturers. At some point they will have to give customers who already own a cell phone a reason to buy another.

Intel is already promising to have dual Wi-Fi/WiMAX chip sets in millions of notebooks. One small problem: Both radios cannot operate at the same time.

Maybe that’s why WiMAX promoters are telling us Wi-Fi has a place only in the home. They also say because Wi-Fi is free or unlicensed it is subject to lots of interference. Santiago tells me Metro Wi-Fi doesn’t make sense. It takes too many access points to deploy over a city.

And yet Motorola just announced CPE (Customer Premises Equipment) that sits on a desktop. I’m confused. What about my Wi-Fi connection at home? Do I still need it? Will Wi-Fi and WiMAX interfere with one another until Intel solves the problem?

Motorola’s Santiago also volunteers these reality checks. Although WiMAX does have a potential range of 50 miles, you would need a huge antenna to make that happen. And it will have the same range as cellular (1 kilometer to 2 kilometers), because it needs to use the same cell towers to be cost-effective.

Will it outperform Wi-Fi in Mbps? No, says Santiago, it will be equivalent to 802.11g with peak data rates in a 10MB channel of 30Mbps.

End-users and corporate users may not have much say in how this plays out in the end, but sometimes doing business is like defending democracy: An informed citizenry is the best defense.