The WiMax technology has been put forward as a way to shake up not one, but two oligopolies. It is a method of wirelessly transmitting data over long distances. It can be used in place of home broadband service from the phone or cable company. And it may also provide an alternative to cellphone networks for on-the-go Internet access. Intel has been a main backer.
Here’s one little problem with it. According to Buzz Broadband, a small Australian company that was an early WiMax adopter, it doesn’t work very well. This report by CommsDay, an Australian telecom publication, on a speech at a WiMax conference in Bangkok, quotes Garth Freeman, the company’s chief executive, as saying that WiMax has been a “disaster” that “failed miserably.”
The technology, which has been promoted as covering distances as far as 50 kilometers (31 miles), only reached 2 kilometers, he said. It had trouble indoors at more than 400 meters from the transmitter. And there was so much latency — delays in the transmission — that it was unacceptable for some applications, like voice calls.
Mr. Freeman said that Buzz had abandoned WiMax for a mix of other technologies.
WiMax certainly does have its fans. The CommsDay article quoted another Australian Internet provider, Internode, who was satisfied with WiMax.
Questions about performance are not the only troubles WiMax has. In the United States, the two biggest proponents of the technology are Sprint and Clearwire, a startup. Both have a patchwork of licenses around the country, and there is a great deal of logic in combining them into one venture. But negotiations over this have foundered.
Both AT&T and Verizon have committed to a different technology, LTE, the successor to the GSM cellphone standard, for both data and voice service. The LTE system is supposed to have more capacity and cover longer distances, but it is not done yet, so we can’t really compare it with WiMax, which also looked great in theory and appears to have problems in reality.
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