WiMAX, the red headed stepchild of the wireless industry, scored some “major” wins today in two of the most unexpected place. First win: New Jersey, where the traffic authority has decided to roll out 100 WiMAX towers using the 4.9 GHz spectrum over 360 miles of highway that will be used for things like sending out messages to electronic signs, monitoring traffic, wireless cameras, and transmitting weather information. Second win: North Iraq, where Fanoos Telecom is rolling out internet services to the cities of Sulaimaniyah, Mosul and Kirkuk. The company already has 250,000 people using their voice network, so getting people to sign up for a network that lets them use Facebook and watch YouTube videos shouldn’t be too hard.
In all seriousness though, we like to make fun of WiMAX only because it never really stood a chance at replacing the GSMA backed standards that have been in use for several decades now. For corporations rolling out a private network it may make sense, but with operators looking for new business models to pay for the costly upgrades they’re going to be performing to their networks over the next few years, they should start trying to become much more friendly to corporate clients. Verizon is famous for this, saying that their upcoming LTE network welcomes any and all devices, because one day, as hard as it is to believe, your refrigerator will come with some sort of screen attached to a door panel that gives you access to the internet, recipes, and who knows what else.
Wireless penetration in advanced markets is already over 100%, and you can’t go on raising the prices for services year after year when you show no appreciable improvement in either network speed or coverage, so why not charge comapnies like Samsung a small fee so that all their devices come with “internet out of the box”? Amazon has already done this with the Kindle, and it surprises me that no one else has tried something similar.