802.16 WiMax Wireless Broadband on the Horizon

securitas writes "Products using the emerging IEEE 802.16 WiMax wireless broadband standard should be available early in 2005. WiMax's hundreds of megabits per second bandwidth looks promising to many vendors and service providers who met in San Jose at last week's Wireless Communications Association (WCA) International Technical Symposium & Business Expo. The point-to-multipoint 802.16d standard, with a 50-kilometre range, is expected to be complete by February, ratified in March and deployed in the first quarter of 2005." (Read on for more.)

"The IEEE 802.16e spec, which will support mobile applications, is expected to be complete by early 2005. Nextel, Sprint and BellSouth are all interested in the technology to deploy services like streaming video and TV, wireless phones, and high-speed Internet service in unserved, low-density areas near high-density ones. Mobile operators in developing countries like Brazil's NEOTEC group have already successfully tested an 802.16 wireless broadband deployment. Intel communications group executive VP and GM, Sean Maloney, is banking on it. From the article: 'We believe that WiMax can happen, and be widely deployed, and be a big deal in the next three years the same way Wi-Fi has been a big deal the last two years.' Mirrors at Network World Fusion, Techworld and PCWorld. What happens when techies start to build their own 802.16x WiMax VoIP systems?"

802.16

0.05 better than 802.11!

I don't think this will displace 802.11

From the sound of it, this new spec appears to deliver far too much bandwidth to really make it cost-effective for the average consumer. IMO this is best for fixed-wireless installations where installing cabling is too cost-prohibitive - especially if the range of the radio tech used in this spec is decent enough.

great

great, even more pain [unbehagen.com] !

This is promising.

But I can't realy see how this is gonna work? Usually, higher bandwith means higher frequency. Higher frequemcy means less range, since the waves is easilier interupted by obstacles, like trees. and so on. Someone care to explain this to me?

Re:This is promising.

Usually, higher bandwith means higher frequency. Higher frequemcy means less range, since the waves is easilier interupted by obstacles, like trees. and so on. Someone care to explain this to me?

Without getting too technical - you're right, sort of. The article is rather muddled; it mentions the frequencies in question (2.5GHz region, which is microwave), and then has some confused sentence about "point-to-multipoint meaning no line-of-sight is necessary". Well, that's nonsense. Microwave propogation is almost exclusively line-of-sight. Without LOS, signal strength drops off dramatically.

However, if you use spread-spectrum techniques (which 802.16 does), you can overcome a lot of these problems. Basically, the characteristics of a wideband SS signal are such that multiple reflections (even weak ones) can be separately received and combined. This is a big gain over narrowband radio, where reflections cause inter-symbol interference which causes the signal to deteriorate.

Another factor that may be more significant - this standard seems mainly to be for delivering broadband to fixed installations (not mobile stations). Well that's an easier job by orders of magnitude: you only have to site the antennas correctly once, and you never have to worry about them moving around.

In conclusion: it's quite different from the radio technology we're most used to, and there's a little thing called progress to factor in too! :)

Hope that helps.

If you don't know what you're talking about

please refrain from posting.

Spectral efficiency measures the ability of a wireless system to deliver information within a given amount of radio spectrum and is directly related to system capacity. It determines the amount of radio spectrum required to provide a given service (e.g., 10 kbps voice service, 100 kbps data service) and the number of base stations required to deliver that service to end users. In the latter years of deployment, when subscriber penetration is high, it becomes one of the primary determinants of system economics.

Spectral Efficiency = Channel Throughput/Channel Bandwidth

Spectral efficiency is measured in units of bits/second/Hertz/cell (b/s/Hz/cell). It determines the total throughput each base station (cell or sector) can support in a network in a given amount of spectrum.

Copied from: http://www.arraycomm.com/pcct/spectral_efficiency. htm

There's a million places I could point you to. So to say that capacity and frequency are not related is simply wrong, if not ignorant. The same definition stands for all wireless communications schemes, regardless of whether they use cells or not. All operators, whether it's Telephony or Networking deploy their networks and offer services based on spectral efficiency and power needed to achieve that efficiency. Nothing else. Bit rates, Frequency and all the rest of it are just byproducts...

hmmmm...

Nextel, Sprint and BellSouth are all interested in the technology
Great...just what's needed from a phone provider: more wireless technology that they can provide terrible reception with.

yikes

that's bound to make more than a few people sterile.

long range is nice

50 _kilometer_ range? wow. that's more than enough to connect 2 people in nearby cities.

this should be pretty sweet for rural networking. i foresee a flood of long range domestic and roaming wireless plans coming up circa 2005.

50 kilometers ? Power consumption ?

The point-to-multipoint 802.16d standard, with a 50-kilometre range, is expected to be complete by February

I wonder if it becomes actually viable ... The power consumption might reduce the actual advantages for a laptop/mobile system ?. The battery is thing still dragging mobile computing , it's still 1970's space-age technology. But maybe methanol fuel cells will come up by 2005 end ?

[http://wiki.dotgnu.org/DotGNUPeople/gopz]

Re:50 kilometers ? Power consumption ?

The battery is thing still dragging mobile computing , it's still 1970's space-age technology

Because before 70's "space age" batteries, they were using what? gerbil-powered dynamos?

50 Km range uh?

The point-to-multipoint 802.16d standard, with a 50-kilometre range

Omnidirectional antenna-equipped routers will double as handy microwave ovens.

What about Toshiba?

Last I heard the first company developing/testing 100mbit wireless was Toshiba. I heard this on The Register, but I can't seem to find the link.

Does this have anything to do with them? Have they had any input/association with this? Have there been any copyright issues or anything?

Where will they find the Frequency

My largest concern regarding this is the frequencies are they going to mess it up again with hair brained auctions (Cell phone's) or make it so restrictive that even my microwave will buzz my connection (802.11). I fear for how the FCC will dream up this freq. distribution.

MaBell Will Stop This

Don't worry, I doubt this technology will ever see the light of day... or if it does, it will remain cost-prohibitive for regular consumers.

Too many people have way too much to loose if this becomes the standard like 802.11 has. In any urban or suburban areas, image how many Wifi hotspots there are within 50km... or even 25km.

Cell providers and ISP's are going to fight this every step of the way because of the competition this could pose... with the right hardware. How long before we see 802.14 VoIP handsets sold on thinkgeek? ;)

How fast is it?

All I see anywhere is 'hundreds of megabits per second' but i haven't seen any actual numbers... anyone know?

Great potential for developing countries

There is no real demand for this kind of technology in countries that are already well-cabled with more fibre-optic cable than they can ever use.

We did a project once in Nigeria that depended on semi-reliable Internet connections across the country. The only option for our client was to install VSAT stations, at a cost of $50,000 each not counting operating costs.

With 50km point-to-point range it becomes very possible for operators to build a national IP network with local distribution via WiFi or cable.

This could do for Internet what the GSM has done for telephony in large parts of Africa (i.e. brought modern communications to millions of people who have never been able to get it before).

Re:Great potential for developing countries

There is no real demand for this kind of technology in countries that are already well-cabled with more fibre-optic cable than they can ever use.
Yes there is. The fibre-optic cable is great for the internet backbone, but you don't have fibre to every house in the suburbs and rural areas. This wireless tech would be truly excellent here!

With 50km point-to-point range it becomes very possible for operators to build a national IP network with local distribution via WiFi or cable.

Not really. While you could build a wireless backbone using this technology, the bandwidth would suck. And using this tech for the backbone and using cable for local distribution would be insane. This new tech is great for the last mile distribution of internet access. The backbone is better built by using fiber.

WiMax in wide range of bands

The original article alludes to using WiMax in licensed bands such as 2.5 to 2.7 GHz and, while another article [ofdmnews.com] suggests the potential for operation in a wide range of bands from 2 to 11 GHz (and early testing in unlicensed frequencies at 5.8 GHz). This suggests that these devices will initially be available in mutually incompatible consumer versions (unlicensed spectrum) and service provider versions (licensed spectrum).

I wonder what this will do for adoption because the volume on the RF components will be fragmented across multiple bands. I also wonder if people will create WiMax variants that interfere with WiFi by operating in the same frequency space.

Wonderful! and Open Source enabled?

Given that, so far, only 802.11b is truly Open Source capable, can we hope that this one will be ?

As so many (supposedly) Open Source coders have been ready to wave their legs in the air and sign NDAs to do drivers for various supposedly OS-Oses I won't hold my breath.

Don't know which ones? If they aren't 802.11b just try to see the hardware specs they used to write the driver. The code is NOT open if you can't publish the specs.

Security(WiMax) Security(WiFi)?

I do hope that WiMax features more robust encryption than does WiFi with WEP. Something tells me that service providers are not going to be too concerned with interception of their customer's packets (only theft of bandwidth). And even if WiMax is "secure," I'm sure that it will include a nice backdoor for government counter-freedom operations.

Just boost wifi power to, oh say, 800-1400 watts

Imagine the benefits of allowing wifi card makers to boost the power of their transmiters. It would make the microwave oven obsolete too. An entire dinner could be cooked while it sits on the dinner table, oe for that matter, before it even leaves the grocery store. Cows could be cooked while they stand in the fields. Also, no need for water purification plants, since all rivers and lakes would be under a constant boil. And, best yet, no need for artificial heat in your house during those cold winter months, since you'd be warmed from within!

Microwave, rf, big bucks and bandwidth

oh my!

This sounds expensive.

This sounds only like a service provider tool from a big building to a lot of locations with the downstread demarc connecting to service provider equipment with ethernet out or long haul out to remote locations. I can see this probably will be a tool for telcos or big companies/governments in the 3rd world or other locations in the US. I can see this used to feed bandwidth into more rural areas where high capacity fiber won't be pushed and then the big boys can push DSL while waiting to sell bandwidth do their smaller competitors

If you've got pockets with money and can pay alot to use a big building's roof ala TowerStream [towerstream.com]. But you still need your bandwidth from somewhere.

Wow, the future is the past. Microwave for broadband like AT&T Long Lines [long-lines.net]. Now it looks like selling those towers off was like Polaroid selling off anything digital.

NYC: you tawkin' ta ME?

I work with the NYC City Council, and we're studying wireless "broadband" deployment. NYC has 20M people inside a 50Km radius - that's 8bps per person on a 155Mbps 802.16a segment. And the multipath reflections through our concrete canyons would destroy much of that bandwidth. Cranking down the power reduces the multipath, and allows our dense city to scope a segment to a smaller footprint, shared by a manageable number of people. How about attenuating the shape of the field, a la Pringles can, to merely fill the grid of Manhattan streets? External building antennae can hook the WAN signal to LANs, without wasting its power soaking through the concrete. Anyone have a field demo of this topology running? Want to talk to my committee in sunny Manhattan?

With all due respect,

Bullshit. "802.anything" is a joke. I'm no great networking hero, but I know that every single wireless setup I've ever seen runs at less than half its rated capacity - even when the WAP and client are in LOS, less than 10m away from each other.

A guy I know recently forked over a lot of $$$ for a "54mbit" setup (wireless cable router and a 54mbit PCI card) - the kit is spaced about 15 metres apart, with only 2 non-load-bearing walls (read partitions) in the way - it runs at about 10mbps.

My own kit is a simple WAP and PCMCIA card - old kit - supposedly 11mbps. Runs at just over 2mbps.

So, I ask you this:

Has anyone here ever actually got the advertised rate from this stuff (or even anything close)? Or am i condemned to watch my streamed divx pr0n at 10fps for eternity ;) ?

Afterthough: Will they ever actually make 802.xx kit which *actually works as a network card* - ie allowing frame injection using libpcap? Or is my segfault / bsod pain to continue?

I don't know why slashdot is so hung up on WiFi

Someone predicts that a new standard will be available in 2005, with equipment presumeably following a year after, and it makes headlines on slashdot. In the meantime, hardcore 3G makes it to the United States and nary a peep out of the slashdot editors.

The most exciting telecomm development that I have seen in the last year is Verizon's announcement that they are going to roll out EV-DO in the US. This has already had serious consequences in the cellular industry, with AT&T/Cingular being forced to accelerate merger talks to compete with the offering.

I think the problem is that the slashdot editors are PC geeks who have played around with WLANs and so understand the technology somewhat, but have no clue as to the kind of technology uber-cooolness that goes into making a 3-G system. From a comm-theory standpoint, WiFi is a joke compared to the theoretical and technological miracle that allows you to make a call over a digital cell-phone.

WiFi technologies are simply this: a desperate effort by the traditional "datacomm" companies to grab a piece of the lucrative cell-phone business. WiFi is their lever, and they are trying their best to use it to muscle into the business, by making wild claims and even wilder technological predictions. These datacomm companies do not have the technological knowhow to make real competitors to cell-phone systems, and they have latched on to WiFi as a drowning man to a piece of wood. Maybe when Flarion's product matures, they will have a better story.

While I sympathize with the objectives of the Ciscos, Broadcoms and Intels of the world, I can still see through their rather transparent claims.

Slashdot seems to have bought the WiFi line hook, line and sinker.

Magnus.

Intel is making a WiMax chip

Intel [businessweek.com] also is making graphics chips for handheld computers, pushing into digital-imaging chips, and planning to roll out WiMax, a Wi-Fi standard that may help bring the Internet to rural areas and developing countries at a fraction of today's cost (see BW, 1/19/04, "The Next Big Thing For Wireless?" [businessweek.com]). With the chips rolling out in a steady stream, few are betting against Intel this year.

From the article in the link

The Next Big Thing For Wireless? [businessweek.com]

The Next Big Thing For Wireless? WiMax is a lot faster than Wi-Fi and has a bigger range -- but success isn't assured

Everywhere you turn these days, there seems to be a new way to zap data through the ether: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPRS, 3G. Now comes yet another addition to this alphabet soup, a technology that can blast data seven times faster and up to a thousand times farther than popular Wireless Fidelity, or Wi-Fi, systems. Officially called IEEE 802.16 but marketed under the sexier moniker WiMax, it's bound to be a hot topic this year, thanks to aggressive backing from chip giant Intel (INTC ) and support from equipment makers such as Nokia (NOK ) and Alcatel (ALA ). The first WiMax gear should be on the market by the end of 2004.

Think of it as Wi-Fi on steroids. While Wi-Fi hotspots have a radius of about 100 feet, WiMax uses state-of-the-art microwave radio technology to span distances as great as 30 miles. That means it could be used as an alternative to copper wire and coaxial cable for connecting homes and businesses to the Internet. If it flies, WiMax could reinvigorate competition between dominant telecom and cable companies and rivals using a whole new infrastructure -- not just leasing space on existing networks. "This is the next telecom revolution," says Rudy Leser, vice-president of marketing for Tel Aviv-based Alvarion Ltd. (ALVR ), the leading maker of broadband wireless equipment.

That's just for starters. The real buzz about WiMax is that Intel Corp. is aiming to shrink the technology down to a chip so that it can be built directly into PCs and laptops. Intel did the same thing for Wi-Fi with its Centrino mobile processor line and helped accelerate the Wi-Fi boom. Analysts figure WiMax laptops could show up by 2006, letting people get on the Net wirelessly virtually anywhere. "If you like Wi-Fi, you're going to love Wi-Fi everywhere," says Sean M. Maloney, general manager of the Intel Communications Group. Pyramid Research LLC of Cambridge, Mass., figures that nearly 4 million people will be using such "broadband wireless" technology by 2008. Revenues from broadband wireless services -- mostly based on WiMax -- could top $2.1 billion annually by that time.

If all of this sounds like a marketing pitch from the 1990s bubble, it should. Telecom startups such as Winstar LLC (IDT ) and Teligent Inc. went broke trying to sell similar wireless technology to businesses and homes. But WiMax has a big cost advantage. The boom-era startups used proprietary equipment that cost as much as $1,200 for every customer site -- three times as much as early WiMax products are expected to. Thanks to standardization, prices should plunge even further in the future, to less than $200 for the gear that sits at the customer's site. Then, when WiMax migrates into laptops, the cost to buy into it will edge toward zero.

Still, success is hardly assured. The biggest question is whether even gung-ho techies need another technology to tap the Net. Wired broadband is widely available in homes and businesses in the U.S., Western Europe, and parts of Asia. The rapidly spreading Wi-Fi provides speedy Web links on the go. And wireless companies are rolling out ever-faster ways for their customers to tap the Net. On Jan. 8, for instance, U.S. giant Verizon Communications I

Return of the Marketdroid's

Once again we are confronted with the hype for a new all singing all dancing wireless broadband standard which operates in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. The data rates are theoretically possible with no interference from Microwave Ovens, cordless phones 802.11x.

With commercially available equipment from Cisco you can already build a reliable 25Km link which requires that the antennas be mounted at the 150' level due to the curvature of the earth.

So the advertised range figures are possible but only in environments such as the Serengeti with the transmitters mounted on 500' towers. In this environment this could bring true internet backbones to the third world. Remeber up to 1996 or so the transcontinental links were only DS3 (44Mb/Sec)

Since when have the marketdroids ever allowed someting like the laws of physics to interfere with their hype since they will try and tell you a single tower located in a valley will serve all the communities around it which happen to be on the other side of the range of hills surrounding the valley with the predictable results (Sigh...)

Finally

People can stop trying to hack 802.11[abg] into a long range protocol. I've have potential clients ask me for long range wireless solutions and basically had to tell them that it can be done with 802.11[abg] but it's hacky, unsupported, and I can't do it (being a software guy and neither an infrastructure nor soldering guy).

Five mod points, no sensible replies here

I've got five moderator points this morning and there is exactly one post in here I'd mod up - the guy who suggested that people not post if they don't know anything, but he already has a +5.

There is a link in my sig to my journal and there you'll find a brief description of how 802.11 (wireless lan) and 802.16 (wireless access) differ.

50km == 30 miles. I've installed 2400MHz and 5800MHz links on the same 22 mile path and I've done a bunch of other 20 +/- 2 mile shots using 5800MHz.

At 22 miles with 19dB dishes on each end we saw analog modem speeds with 2400MHz (802.11b) equipment. Using 29dB 2' Andrew dishes and 100mw 5800MHz radios we saw a solid 5+ mbits on a radio that maxed out at 8 mbits.

I've planned a 40km 45 mbit shot for a project that didn't go through - I think we had a 4' dish on the remote tower and a 6' dish on the skyscraper end of the link.

Whatever band and modulation method they're using in these breathy 802.16 announcements the physics aren't going to be much different than what I describe above - long shots are point to point, cells are small (3km - 4km) if you want to go fast, and I mentally say "snake oil" when I hear the letters O-F-D-M. It works, but it ain't "all that", as they say.

So, mod me wise, or mod me troll, but know this: The slashdot collective has as much business talking about wireless networking as any room full of male gynecologists and cross dressers has talking about childbirth.

50 K range?

Wow you won't even need a "sniffer." You'll be able to smell that from the next city.

Boon for Freenets?

Consider the following:
Something like wifi, open frequencies, but long range. Like everyone being able to have a microwave relay with which they could contribute to the bandwidth and routing capabilities of the whole internet. Could this cause something many have talked about and foreseen, an open, peer-style network like the internet, but with even more and smaller players? With signals being routed shortest path over a network which is huge and more interconnected than anything before it? Will the frequency range be open like wifi? The TCP/IP is designed to be easily distributed like this, right? Even if the answers are 'yes', will initial large players try to lock something down that is obviously (to semi-concious networking experts anyway) something that might be almost as free and open as air?

Coming soon to Houston County, Georgia

There is an effort to setup one of these networks in my county this year (2004). They expect to need two antennas to cover the entire county. Intel and IBM met with the public and municipal officials last week. So far, no company has offered to be the ISP, but BellSouth, Cox, and Alltel are obvious choices. Initially, service will be offered to businesses, later to residential customers. If the project goes through, Intel says this will be the first site in the United States to be covered.

Official Home Page [wirelessho...county.org] (only looks right in IE)
Stories [tallahassee.com] from the local paper

complications

I wonder how such a thing will interfere with existing 802.11 installations; I can't imagine all the traffic generated by Windows machines and their lovely network-abusing protocols (NetBIOS and the like). What happens when the signals from this network overlap with the 802.ll networks (which i'm sure would happen)? is .05Ghz enough signal variance to not cause problems?

(I'm asking because I honestly don't know.)

Why-Fi - Wi-Fi - WhyFi - WiFi

Why-Fi.org: Everything WhyFi, Wi-Fi, and WiFi [why-fi.org]

Why-Fi.net: Everything WhyFi, Wi-Fi, and WiFi [why-fi.net]