Long story
Wireless Shootout: Suits Vs. Cowboys
Nick Tredennick with Brion Shimamoto, Editors, Gilder Technology Report 02.06.07, 4:40 PM ET
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It's the Suits versus the Cowboys in the battle for your wireless future. The Suits are the cellular carriers; the Cowboys are entrepreneurs implementing the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' 802.xx protocols. The Suits bring zillions of dollars in wireless infrastructure, a long operating history, a huge base of captive customers, thousands of roaming agreements and vertical integration of systems, software and services. The Cowboys bring ... uh, they bring ... uh ... well, they'll improvise. My money is on the Cowboys. The battle replays minicomputers and PCs. The minicomputers were the Suits. The PCs were the Cowboys. PCs won handily. Here's the story for wireless.
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[I use Verizon EV-DO/KPC650/KR1 at home with an external antenna to get one bar of coverage most of the time]
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The Future
In the 802 vision, you wear an earpiece connected by Bluetooth (802.15.3) to a handset that has a secure, mobile Wi-Fi (802.11) local-area connection to an access point and has ZigBee (802.15.4) connections to local-area sensors. The access point has a WiMAX (802.16) wide-area connection to the "lambda rail." The WiMAX base station supports 802.16e, so the backend of your car's Wi-Fi access point can connect to the WiMAX base station as you cruise the Interstate. If you cannot connect to a free-access network, your gear will connect to a cellular network.
Three developments may change this vision: cheap radios, mesh networking and smart antennas.
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It is looking like Wi-Fi has the potential to provide universal access in cities and in rural areas, and it can also act as the wireless backhaul network. WiMAX will have an uphill struggle to achieve affordability before being overwhelmed by Wi-Fi deployments. Wi-Fi builds for volume, and WiMAX builds for performance. We have seen this before in the battle between PCs and workstations. Volume wins.
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{this afternoon we had Siavash Alamouti en.wikipedia.org intel.com over to explain the wonders of 802.16e, 2 hours was just a warmup. Fun to hear him quoting Greg Raleigh, now a Qualcomm VP} |
