Dallas for WISPCON, Santa Clara for ISPCON, now Boston... Life has been a bit of a whirlwind of travel for me these last three weeks.
As I listen to yet another speaker drone on with rosy projections for the future of WiMAX at the WiMAX World Conference & Exposition in Boston October 26-28, 2005, I find myself forced once again to resort to my Verizon BroadbandAccess card to establish reliable and consistent Internet access (including uploading this blog posting) in what ought to be the hotbed of WiMAX connectivity on the planet during this week.
As usual at a large conference, the Wi-Fi access is either dysfunctional or totally saturated. That's to be expected - too many conference centers, including the Boston World Trade Center where WiMAX World is being held, simply haven't upgraded their Wi-Fi to meet the enormous increase in demand from every third person wanting to use Wi-Fi simultaneously. The inadequate Wi-Fi service should be an instructive lesson on how and why WiMAX is supposed to "fix" the issues we're told that makes Wi-Fi unsuitable for large scale deployments, and "3G" unsuitable for future broadband applications.
But...
Show organizers... and the represented vendors, and the WiMAX industry as a whole seem to have completely overlooked one of the most obvious ways to demonstrate the capabilities and the reality of WiMAX - loan out some portable WiMAX gear to the herd of Press that's attending WiMAX World so that they can get a hands-on, real-world (at least approximating real-world) experience with WiMAX. Even at a conference, having something that you can actually try out for yourself away from handlers would have gone a long way towards answering the Press' pervasive questions about whether WiMAX is "real" or not.
What I describe could have been done; kudos to a NextNet Wireless staffer for a brief loan of an Expedience CPE that I witnessed during booth setup time yesterday. That staffer had the right idea - the base station was across the street shooting through a big chunk of structure - pretty challenging, but was actually working as advertised. But the demonstration was 1) a very brief loan, 2) effectively restricted to the area around the NextNet booth (the staffer wanted his gear back, and the loanee wasn't Press), and 3) NextNet Expedience isn't WiMAX!
There is some impressive hardware being shown off in booths. For example, Intel is showing off desktop WiMAX Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) from Alvarion and Airspan operating on a "Booth Area Network" (BAN :-) for passerby demonstrations, which is nice, but hardly an effective demonstration of what WiMAX really is.
Perhaps next year... but with WiMAX... isn't it perpetually a "good stuff next year" story since, what, 2003? One one of today's presentations I saw a WiMAX timeline that projects out to 2010, which is an (expletive deleted - let's just say "unrealistic") timeline considering Broadband Wireless technology as a whole is evolving in realtime now. I'll be looking hard to find some better examples of WiMAX "Ready for Business Now" while I'm attending WiMAX World.
This article is Copyright © 2005 by Steve Stroh. Excerpts and links are expressly permitted (and encouraged.)
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