Is WiMax dead?

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rpm

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Is WiMax dead?

For years, WiMax has been held up as something of a panacea, a technology that would finally deliver ubiquitous and cheap wireless broadband, especially in emerging markets. But it’s taken so long to get off the ground that it’s in danger of being superseded.
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Is speed such an issue?
I have a Telkom 384kbp ADSL line. My only real issue is the cost of the service. So what if it take 10 minutes to download a large file. I pay for data, not time!
How will my business achieve real benefits, it terms of rands and cents, by faster download speeds?
384kbp serves me fine. Just reduce the cost!
 
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Well if it is dead, dont expect the recent Altech ruling to have any material effect for the man in the street. Lets not fool ourselves, the (local loop) fibre going into the ground is mainly for enterprises and no one is daft enough to lay new copper.
 
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yea, with the current pricing it won't get very far and i doubt any network is ready to push it cheaply for fear of competition from the bigger guys who are basically just squatting with it
 
Below is a price quoted on Telkoms site - http://www.telkom.co.za/athome/products/wimax/cost.html
WiMAX up to 512Kbps Access (access only) R 240.00 p/m
Access installation R490.00 N/A R490.00. So WiMAX is commercially available and at a similar price to ADSL and the data price will be the same R79/gig. There are a few providers that are looking at going commercial. MWEB and WBS/Vodacom are two big names. SO I don't think the technology is dead by a long shot, cosidering also that the big name behind it is Intel and they are starting to releace Centrino Chipsets with WiMAX on board.
 
Well as soon as the wimax terminals become commodity items that you can purchase from any store, or in PDA's notebooks then we will see operators considering deployment of mobile wimax. Hopefully the prices should drop then since there will be no customer maintenance issues. If the customer Wimax device breaks it is there problem.
 
Wireless Internet is cool for when you are travelling. I use it and I am happy. What I really want is wired Internet at decent speeds and decent prices. Then wireless could become my backup Internet connection that I use when I am out and about. I think it is weird that a lot of us have to use our wireless connections as our primary Internet connections.

Give me fibre or even fast copper and I am happy. It keeps its speed nicely and the pings are generally better.
 
pkid said:
Wireless Internet is cool for when you are travelling. I use it and I am happy. What I really want is wired Internet at decent speeds and decent prices. Then wireless could become my backup Internet connection that I use when I am out and about. I think it is weird that a lot of us have to use our wireless connections as our primary Internet connections.

Give me fibre or even fast copper and I am happy. It keeps its speed nicely and the pings are generally better.
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If you can get wireless with the same speed and pings will you take it?
 
WiMax, in South Africa, may as well be dead - of the duck variety: NeoGhost doesn't feel like offering WiMax to residential customers and SMMEs; WBS much the same although WBS doesn't have enough WiMax spectrum anyway IMO, whereas both Telkodemonopolies and NeoGhost comparatively have oodles of WiMax spectrum. It is possible to get WiMax from Telkodemonopolies, but my personal experience with this route is that Telkodemonopolies doesn't have enough WiMax base-stations, i.e. coverage is an issue, and Telkodemonopolies has been messing about with WiMax for longer than any other company in SA.

Then there is !CASA, which is IMO the biggest nail in WiMax's coffin in SA - !CASA should have had the WiMax spectrum allocations sorted out long before 2008, instead !CASA only wants to dish out 20MHz to each WiMax operator [Telkodemonopolies & NeoGhost & Sentech excluded from this unfair restriction], by the time that !CASA has decided how & to whom it will allocate WiMax spectrum, it will not be commercially viable for new WiMax operators to enter the market and especially not with less than 30MHz each.
 
BBSA said:
If you can get wireless with the same speed and pings will you take it?
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Don't get me wrong I will always use wireless for when I am out and about and I think that it performs well. If the pings could be that low I would love it because then I could play games during meetings ;)

I would still take a wired connection. The speeds just seem more stable to me. I am talking about the 384 and 512 DSL packages here. I know that when I had the 4096 package Telkom seemed to limit most connections that I had to 512 and so the line never really performed that well. Going with IS semi-shaped made it perform a lot better.

I know that fibre is really expensive and we probably won't get it for a while but I think in the long run I will take a fiber connection as my primary Internet connection any day of the week even if there was a wireless service with similar speeds/ping. If I had a choice between a 14 mbit/s ADSL2 connection or a 14 mbit/s HSDPA connection I would chose the ADSL connection any day of the week.

I just think that it is sad in ZA that we seem to pay lots of money for low data caps and slow/unreliable speeds. I don't think that it is the fault of the technology but rather of ICASA, the DOC and the telco companies. The DOC will always mess up stuff, ICASA will always give too little spectrum or be too weak to make the difference they should and the telcos will always look to shaft the consumer. Nothing much has seemed to change in the four years or so I have been reading MyADSL. Speeds have increased slightly and prices have come down a bit but it has always seemed to me that that has happened a bit by accident rather than because companies/government really cared.
 
Not to mention our Gov's political meddling and self-serving favouritism, allowing a company like Sentech to squat on 78MHz of spectrum indefinitely (esp. 50MHz in the prized 2.5-2.6 band), while the market cries for this precious resource.
 
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