WiMax Worth the Investment?

Although WiMax has made some strides in its development, the technology still has a ways to go to reach critical mass. The well-publicized field trials taking place in parts of this country over the next few months will tell us a lot of it has any chance to succeed. Investors are treading cautiously as well, since it wasn’t that long ago when the dot-com and telecom busts put a serious hole in our economy that we are still trying to fill. It’s not clear whether investors should put their money into the big boys like Motorola and Intel or stay with smaller telecoms who are looking to find niche marketplaces for WiMax deployment.

SBC offers WiFi Access via Payphones

Telecom SBC said that it plans to offer public WiFi access through its pay phones, a move in response to Verizon's recent announcement to launch WiFi service through 1,000 pay phones in the New York City. However, unlike Verizon, SBC says it has not yet decided whether to charge for this service or not. Proxim, Symbol, and Cisco are said to be the front-runners for the contract to WiFi-enable SBC's pay phones. The company has not yet said where it will launch its new WiFi service or how large it will be. Look for more telecoms to roll out WiFi through their pay phones in the months to come. On the cable side of broadband, Comcast has also recently said that if Verizon's hot spot service takes off, it would launch its own WiFi service.

Cisco Acquires Scientific Atlanta

The acquisition of one of the largest suppliers to the cable industry of set-top receivers allows Cisco even further entrance to home markets: The company bought Linksys a few years to get into the consumer play, and its purchase of WLAN switch maker Airespace was originally perceived as just an enterprise entry.But the Airespace division was key in pushing out Cisco’s mesh product line this week, which is aimed at municipal deployment. Witness BelAir’s recent announcement of cable-plant compatible mesh Wi-Fi that eliminate the backhaul problem wherever there’s a cable line, and Tropos’s announced entry in Sept. into cable/mesh products with Scientific-Atlanta is, one might suspect, no longer on the table.Cisco’s current product portfolio could let them easily integrated voice, Wi-Fi, remote management, security for home networks, and end-point CPEs for municipal networks into a single black-box. Wherever there’s cable, they can provide a cable-oriented box; where there’s not, Wi-Fi-based CPEs with similar utility could come into play. The bandwidth for streaming video over municipal networks certainly isn’t there, but Cisco isn’t known for a one- or two-year horizon.

Ontario Wi-Fi Municipal

Two Ontario-based companies earlier this week announced the fruition of a two year collaboration: a municipal Wi-Fi network with robust VoIP capabilities.Telecom operator Atria Networks and Wi-Fi infrastructure vendor BelAir Networks announced the launch of a Wi-Fi cloud covering the core downtown section of high-tech center Waterloo, Ontario.The deployment uses BelAir's wireless mesh networking gear—specifically nearly 30 BelAir100 and BelAir200 dual- and multi-radio wireless mesh switches—to blanket almost one square mile of the city's center.