TJ, I am a MESEE too and I have spent some time trying to not just predict, but create, the future. The future is my business and life. That's a peculiarly human trait. Animals live for the day, or more accurately, instant, though some of the smarter beasties, such as primates, plan ahead, at least to some extent, creating very short term and very self-oriented changes to improve their future prospects.
They all exhibit some planning, albeit only in their DNA rather than their minds - such as a praying mantis laying eggs, then dying before the new ones are born. Pure instinct, zero planning.
Humans [some of them] determine the present by acting to create the future, by figuring out what to do to make things how they want them at a later date.
So it is with WiMax. WiMax, WiFi, CDMA2000, EDGE, GPRS, TDMA, GSM, OFDM, TDSCDMA, AMPS, Analogue, 3GSM, WCDMA, are all just various ways of pushing photons through the electromagnetic aether to a recipient who is curious about what is happening elsewhere. Some are better than others.
Those which are better require more cunning processing power to implement. Until processing power is available in a small space at reasonable cost, an air interface has to wait in the wings. They all need a surrounding support team of market share [for economies of scale], subscriber device development, antennae smarts and lots of other things.
In terms of best air interface, GSM and TDMA beat analogue, but GSM beats TDMA. CDMA beats all of those. WiFi is short range only, so to succeed has to have base station costs low enough to make it economic in high population density environments [now the case] as well as subscriber device processing power [also now the case]. OFDM beats CDMA but doesn't yet have critical mass [the decade-long problem for CDMA versus GSM] to beat CDMA. WiMax, which can do long range, is an improvement on CDMA in some respects, but not in sufficient respects, and is no improvement on Flarion's OFDM [now QUALCOMM's], even if it had critical mass and other essential ingredients supporting it.
ME SEE that WiMax might garner some market share, but I think it will be unable to compete with the Ferrari of the air interface world [aka CDMA/OFDM dual mode by QUALCOMM].
Anything WiMax can do, CDMA/OFDM can do better. OFDM/CDMA can do anything better than WiMax.
MESEE that QUALCOMM is in the box seat.
I am creating the future for you and have considered WiMax and decided it is not for you. You are welcome to prove me wrong by buying it. I will be very, very surprised if you do. I am sure that you will instead buy a HSDPA W-CDMA version of QUALCOMM's technology, hopefully with a QUALCOMM asic in it, but their market share of those asics is small at present [meaning they won't suffer an anti-trust attack any time soon] so you probably won't buy QUALCOMM for your first device.
But you'll soon be upgrading to OFDM/CDMA/Wifi/GSM multimode [HSDPA W-CDMA is also royalty-bearing CDMA despite the many letters] and will probably then buy a QUALCOMM asic.
You will use GSM for voice when out in the jungle in backward places, wifi for up close and personal in crowded spectrum places where there are lots of radios or in your personal space where you use wifi as a link to your cyberspace server, CDMA [in HSDPA or EV-DO versions] when needing a wide area network in lower population density environments, and OFDM when in the most developed areas. Eventually, OFDM will be built out to replace all networks. That will take a decade and more, just as it took over a decade to provide pretty good cellphone coverage around the world.
WiMax? What for? What advantage does it have over OFDM by Flarion/QUALCOMM?
You are right that WiMax will become mobile [probably]. But guess what - until the QUALCOMM essential ingredient patents expire, WiMax won't be mobile, or they will pay QUALCOMM 5% or so for the privilege of using QUALCOMM's technology. In which case I'll be delighted to see WiMax selling like hot cakes. Unfortunately, those patents have only a few years to run [only about 3] so I won't really be delighted to see WiMax gaining great market share. I will be perplexed as to how that happened given the market share, years of lead and scale of OFDM/CDMA.
Having experienced the Globalstar fiasco, I know that incompetent marketers can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Verizon, Sprint, Telecom NZ and others have not been brilliant CDMA marketers, so it wouldn't really surprise me. Verizon helped sink Globalstar by greedily charging $3 a minute and a fortune for a phone.
Mqurice |
