There is a lot of people who knock the 3G cellular world and are quick to trumpet the magical wonders of WiMax, the much delayed, long awaited technology formerly known as “fixed wireless.” 3G is here, and if you believe EVDO lovers, well doing well is some parts of the country. On the flip side, all of Intel’s millions hasn’t helped WiMax come to market. Unstrung says that now the first batch of WiMax certified equipment isn’t going to be available till October 2005. Don’t hold your breath. This is only going to delay the general product availability by another few months. Of course, good time for Qualcomm to start making a big push on Flarion based wireless broadband systems. Mike Masnick over at Techdirt writes, “once again, the whole concept of WiMax may have peaked way too early. In the meantime, the companies who are really interested in WiMax have moved on to focus on mobile WiMax equipment which isn’t even standardized yet, let alone certified.”
Now that WiMax is close to shipping, all the vendors seem to be Osborning themselves. Why? Do they want to kill their sales for 18 more months on purpose?
The thing you are missing is that the WiMax market in the US is geared around TDD spectrum. I don’t see how Qualcomm can move into that market quickly, unless Flarion had a secret TDD product they never revealed. Anyway, Qualcomm is already covertly in the mix. Navini’s pre-WiMax stuff is CDMA. Meanwhile, IPWireless is offering a 3G solution for the TDD crowd, which has got to be appealing to anyone who doesn’t want to wait another year or more for mobile WiMax. This is why I was kind of surprised that Qualcomm reps were jocking Verizon at a recent meeeting with an organization that was thinking of building their own network. Apparently, even they don’t realize that they get royalties from all this CDMA-based pre-WiMax stuff.