Seeing WiMAX Unleash Possibilites

Roman aqueducts brought life sustaining water to major cities and areas vital to the Empire. Many consider the aqueducts one of the most important engineering feats in the past 2,000 years.

I wonder what they’ll say about WiMAX?

I’ve been watching from Inside Intel for over five years as WiMAX research grew from a tall tube atop our offices in Hillsboro, Oregon to antennae in Utah streaming feature films to a theater during the Sundance Film Festival.

This month we got to see another WiMAX reality when Sprint’s XOHM home and mobile WiMAX service became available to Baltimore residents.

Leading up to the celebration event on October 8, many of us old-timers inside Intel knew something historic was happening. So we capture video, photos and soundbites for the record. Here are some highlights:

- Take a Mobile WiMAX water Taxi and get 2 to 4 megabits per second of download speed and 0.5 to 1.5 megabits per second upload speed

- Somewhat Frank tells it how he sees it: hooking you laptop up to your TV will be easier…people are lazy, no wires means easier set up for couch surfers

- New possibilities? WiMAX opens the door for a wide range of embedded devices that bring the Internet to things like parking meters and kiosks

- See new WiMAX products from Xohm, and devices like handhelds and laptops that feature Intel’s new WiMAX enabled chips

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I like what the New York Times wrote about WiMAX recently:

> What if you could take along your strong and speedy home Wi-Fi connection wherever you go?That’s the idea behind a new service from Sprint called Xohm, which takes Wi-Fi to its logical extreme. Fittingly, the technology behind it is called WiMax. Although it isn’t widely deployed in the United States, a test run of the service in Baltimore, where it was recently introduced, suggests that it could one day become a solid option for getting things done online and even making phone calls while on the go.

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What’s Next?

- Cities like Chicago, Washington DC, Dallas/Fort Worth, Portland, Providence, Boston and Philadelphia are on the docket for getting public WiMAX services in the near future

- Intel’s World Ahead program continues using WiMAX to bring new Internet services like health and education to rural, developing areas around the world…as part of Intel’s efforts to bring the Internet to 5 million people around the world

- Learning more about WiMAX