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Technology Stocks : Motorola (MOT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (2724)	2/18/2007 7:38:13 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3436

The physical area could be covered by one WiMAX antenna. If the implementation became ubiquitous and cheap, I could see our Internet and cable TV being covered by a WiMAX solution and billed through our association. No more wires (and the subsequent digging up of my lawn every six months), just a receiver at each client in my house. Home phone service could be bundled in. There have been some claims that WiMAX could serve this type of market, but I am very skeptical....particularly about any claims of cable TV over WiMAX. This would require HDTV and regardless of the type of compression that is used, you are talking about a huge amount of bandwidth needed for even a single channel. I dont believe I have ever heard Sprint talk about cable TV as a target market. FWIW, here is somebody who thinks otherwise. wimax.com Of course the cable and phone companies would be out of luck. Am I wrong that this is a disruptive technology? It might be a disruptive technology but I dont think cable TV is in any danger. The first market that WiMAX will go after, and the market in which it has the most chance of success, is the laptop access market. Intel is a huge backer of the technology and wireless access cards are the easiest to implement with any new wireless technology. Intel has talked about a 30-30 model with a $30 cost of equipment and a $30 month flat-rate fee for access. If they hit those targets, it will definitely be a success and has some chance to expand into the desktop market as well. Beyond that, Sprint has talked quite a bit about embedding WiMAX chipsets into handsets and a wide variety of consumer devices like cameras, gaming devices, tablet PC's and audio/video players. They believe that they can do this for a fraction of the cost of 3G technologies. A flat-rate per person subscription fee that covers multiple devices has some chance of success and of changing the way people think about mobile data. If they hit the price points required, there is some chance that this vision could come true. It will take time though....convincing the consumer electronics players to embed WiMAX wont be easy. They will likely have to prove out the model first. Slacker