Alcides Fonseca

First the Australian WiMax pioneer says it’s a disaster and now Tata Communications announce they're rolling out contrywide WiMax… I’m getting confused now :/

For those who haven’t heard of WiMax yet, it’s a broadband internet access everywhere. Not that weak connection you have on you mobile phones or those express card/PCMCIA modems you have. While those only give you 14Mbps download and 6Mbps for upload (that are totally virtual. If you get to half of that, you’re very lucky!), WiMax allows you to have up to 70Mbps up and down when near the access point, but you have a real value of 10Mbps 10km away, which in my opinion is pretty good, but insufficient in 10 years. But we are in the right path.

There are already a few companies offering WiMax services, but in very small areas (remember WiMax is supposed to be global) and there are already a lot of ISPs owning licenses, but no great effort yet. Well, Sprint is ‘soft-launching’ a intel-based WiMax network in downtown Baltimore, Chicago and Washington DC. Still small areas, but being Sprint the third largest telco in the USA, I believe they have the power to really spread WiMax over the country. Europe and Asia will follow.

Back in the WSMU I heard this technology will only be spread by 2012, which I now disagree strongly. In one/two years, there will be express cards (or whatever will be used for the same purpose) and mobile phones/UMPCs will come already with WiMax support. So the revolution is happening quite soon.

Continuing with the presentations from WMSU, this one is about how networking can and should be mobile.

Vitor Jesus started to show how the current networking is far from perfect. One good example of that most wireless technologies don’t work while you are moving or when you move from one Access Point to another. Another limitation is that wireless networks are limited to about 1km, so the connectivity is very limited.

In a near future (2012?) he believes that different technologies can complement each other and that services will allow you to move from cell to cell and your session will be real-time tranfered without losing any data. WiMax will be largely used while WiFi will be avaiable mostly in Malls and other closed buildings. In a farer future, people won’t pay for coverage, only for some extra services, terminals and networks will be more inteligent and together with sensors will raise your Quality of Experience. This last one will be user-centric and is the subject of Vitor and Rui Aguiar’s work.