Mobile working Toolkit

Story: Future of wireless broadband is in the air

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Nice take on WiMAX and 802.20.

Rupert, you obviously have been following developments more closely than most winters on the subject - it's amazing how mis-informed technical editors are on these subjects . . . even worse that it was for the notorious hype following WiFi/802.11b/a/g/n/h/k/i/j/x! Good job ferreting out the political mess.

A few months ago the email transponder for 802.20 has conversation threads to the effect of "Hey, we all know that our motive in getting 802.20 approved as a HIGH SPEED WBB standard is to use it as a Trojan Horse for widespread use. I sent emails and discussed this with a couple people on the committee but mostly got rebuffed when I suggested that they should have rolled the effort into 802.16. This has become as political as I've seen and shows the tremendous clash that is preparing to take place between the 'traditional' cellular companies and their derived wireless technologies and the nascent WBB/WMAN companies and a shift to more open standards represented by 802.16. 802.11 could be seen as a start of this more open market development process or whatever best describes it. The real shift is enabling silicon: WiFi and now WiMAX are possible as mass consumer phenomena because the mass consumer silicon processes have reached the levels of mixed signal module integration and GHz frequencies needed for low costs.

Nice to find a writer with knowledge and brains! Keep up the good work.

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