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November 16, 2005

Mobile WiMax To Incorporate Smart Antennas

By Glenn Fleishman

The mobile WiMax profiles should incorporate MIMO and beamforming: ArrayComm, whose executive chair is the guy behind modern cell phone technology, is very pleased in this press release because two of their key technological leads will be part of mobile WiMax if all continues as it’s so far approved. They distinguish between MIMO and adaptive antenna systems (AAS), which use beamforming. This is a nice distinction.

Their chair is also the guy that trash talks Wi-Fi as if it doesn’t work at all; he’s got a bit of a vested interest in mobile WiMax supplanting both it and cell 3G.

In 2003, he said: “When you try to make Wi-Fi cover a wide area, it’s absolutely the worst way to do it. Think about it. In order to cover a city, you need a million sites; we actually did an analysis of that. And every one of them has got to have backhaul.”

In 2005, on Google’s SF plan to use as few as 300 APs to cover the city: “I calculate they will need more like 3000 AP’s per square mile.”

I don’t disagree with him if he’s talking about providing indoor coverage without a CPE at 54 Mbps raw speed rates. Sure. But Google, EarthLink, and the like, are all assuming a high-gain or ArrayComm-like CPE—see Ruckus’s announcement Monday—and 1 Mbps outdoors as the guaranteed level of service. (Google said 300 Kbps, but that’s a throttled free speed.)

Posted by Glennf at November 16, 2005 3:54 PM

Categories: Mobile WiMax

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