Kool Hand, I've got to hand it to you, you come up with a lot of good digs. you should come over the Alvarion (ALVR) board on Yahoo!. Although it's an open board with some spam postings that Yahoo! boards tend to attract, there are pretty good discussions about WiMAX, WBB, 802.20, etc. Not to detract from Silicon Investor . . this is still one of the best boards for tech stocks . . and much less cluttered.
<snip>802.20 is another broadband wireless standard, this time aimed primarily at mobile users. Designed to deliver around 1Mbps to devices on the move at speeds of up to 250kph, the standards committee have been looking particularly closely at the way it works with 802.11.</snip>
I have had discussions with some of the folks on the 802.20 committee and people at companies involved in both 802.16e and 802.20 on the need for 802.20. The mandate for 802.20, that is the justification as proposed to the IEEE, was that a WBB standard for high speed transit (>250 kph) was needed. But you can tell from the communications that this is political subterfuge: the motive stated by several members is to purposely broaden the scope of 802.20 once it is approved to include all mobile WBB uses in the prescribed spectrum. If they didn't go about the process in this "Trojan Horse" fashion, there would probably not have been a solid case for a separate standard. It would otherwise have been rolled into 802.16e as a special use case or maybe gotten it's own letter designation. But because the companies involved include Motorola, Samsung, Qualcomm and other 'traditional' cellular wireless companies, there was a blatant motive to generate their own industry standard.
What I here from people in the group and from what I can read from the discussions is that this group is a mess. Flarion was involved during the early stages but a coup led by Motorola, Samsung and Qualcom ousted their influence. I could get into the contested technologies of this transition a bit but that is now mostly irrelevant. I don't follow the proceedings very closely now . . just check from time to time to judge the progress. |
