It looks obvious

One of the reasons that I love certain blogs is the smart comments on them.

Today Om Malik reported about WiMax capabilities and cost. The report painted rather pessimistic picture on the future of WiMax:

The report points out that a typical base-station, can handle an area between 3-to-10 kilometers in a non-line of sight environment. Or about 40 Mbit/s per channel, which basically boils down to this: one cell could theoretically allow hundreds of business connections at 1.5 Mbit/s and thousands of residential connections at 256 kbit/s. It is easier to see why I have always believed that this is a long haul technology, which can then work in tandem with WiFi meshes, for local connectivity.

It is hard to see why someone will choose a solution of 256 kbit/s when there are affordable solutions for over 5 MB/s. in addition the cost of building such network, according to the report Om quoted will make it less unlikely to see such solution in the near future.

But then I read this comment and things looks different.

Add wireless fiber solutions like GigaBeam to the WiMax and mesh solutions too make a network (or collection of networks) 99.9% wireless and you’re dead on.

On WiMax, how can we expect those that have already invested in Wi-Fi equipment to run out and change to WiMax? It just isn’t going to happen. I know bunches of people that have sworn never to upgrade their old analog televisions (which represents a huge chunk of America), so how can we expect those same people to keep changing wireless technologies? Those same people still have cell phones that are just cell phones, not the converged devices people like you and I use. I don’t think people are really that dependent on the wireless to necessitate the upgrade so WiMax won’t explode like Wi-Fi has.

I just added this blog to my aggregator.