With reference to the equipment manufacturers for WiMAX... Best you check out the WiMAX forum website to see who the members are. I cannot recall seeing guys like Belkin/Netgear and the likes featuring. Brands to look out for will be Alvarion, Airspan, Redline, Siemens-Nokia... Bear in mind that the stuff currently available is aimed at SME/small corporate type of ADSL replacement services. The later Mobile WiMAX (802.16e) will address personal broaband. Here you will see the usual crowd such as Samsung, Motorola, Nokia, Alcatel. I still have my doubt over whether there will be a sufficient business case to roll out Mobile WiMAX to provide coverage similar to 3G. When technologists hype WiMAX and talk about 50-70km cell radii they unreasonbly refer to ultra best case scenarios. In urban areas you will seldom see cells with more then 2-3km radius. This means that in the end you will need 800-1000base stations to provide real indoor mobile coverage. Even mobile operators like Vodacom and MTN took 6 months to a year to convert EXISTING 2G base station to 3G (little more than installing an additional cabinet, a set of antennas and more backhaul carriers). How long will it take to build 1000 NEW base stations. Speaking with buddies in Vodacom and MTN they tell me it sometimes takes 9 months these days just to get environmental approval for a new base station. I have to agree with Franna on this one... Intel is extremely rampant about embedded WiMAX in notebooks Make no mistake, their Rosedale 1 and 2 chipsets are used in more than half of the currently available WiMAX kit. But whereas embedded WiMAX is concerned...I think embedded HSDPA is travelling faster at the moment. Just go to Option Wireless's website. They already have commercial volumes of miniPCI HSDPA cards available at times when Intel is still far from actual production...
