Australia’s first WiMAX operator, Hervey Bay’s Buzz Broadband, has closed its network, with the CEO labeling the technology as a “disaster” that “failed miserably.” According to CEO Garth Freeman who spoke at the international WiMAX conference in Bangkok, non-line of sight performance was “non-existent” beyond just 2km from the base station, indoor performance decayed at just 400m, while latency rates reached as high as 1000 ms. Under this conditions, the potential killer app for WiMAX — VoIP — was impossible. Mr Freemen continued with praise for HSPA, citing numbers of network deployments that prove the technology works.
However, not all is black for WiMAX. Internode says an Airspan-supplied network is providing consistent average speeds of 6Mbps at distances up to 30km, with CEO Simon Hackett describing the platform as “proven.”
The question you may be asking how the heck will Sprint’s network work? Well, we haven’t tried it and at this stage we can only hope they’ll provide their users with Internode-like experience. Keeping the fingers crossed can’t cause any harm…