petersaville.net

I have been doing a research into the into the Wimax broadband. It is certainly being rolled out across many countries as a legitimate broadband service. It appears its purely economy of scale that is pushing the use of such technology in rural areas. Broadband via FTTN – fibre to the node or FTTR fibre to the residence is of course an expensive option much more than rolling out a series of towers. However, FTTN and FTTR provides more secure, stable and faster provision of services. Wireless services no matter what type it is, can be effected by interference from weather conditions, other signals and atmospherics. Packet loss can also be significant issues with any wireless technology.

Most new developments are installing fibre, here in Port Macquarie the new residential town that is developing at the gateway into Port Macquarie called Sovereign Hills will have fibre to the residence supplies by one ISP locally here in Port Macquarie, this ISP has also run fibre right through the CBD of Port Macquarie. Professor Smarr recently indicated that copper infrastructure is capable for maybe another factor of 10, on broadband speeds... But it's not going to go to 1000 megabits or a gigabyte per second, where most of the action is right now, will the Wimax provide such speeds as well, probably not.

However, from what we are hearing the WiMax technologies compared with the current 3G High Speed Packet Access technologies being rolled out it appears to fail in providing truly mobile applications, 3G wins out there, but where the WiMax wins is on point to point wireless for example a house having an external on the roof of a building.

WiMAX on the other hand faces a number of challenges. Mobile WiMAX standards are still under evaluation. The capex for deploying WiMAX is upto 5-10 times higher than HSDPA because the size of mobile WiMax cells is upto 16 times smaller than the cells in an HSPA system, which would necessitate a larger number of base stations to cover the same geography. (Credit paragraph to http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=166108)

WiMax is currently under evaluation for use in many countries including India.

# posted by Peter Saville - IT Consultant @ 4:54 AM