Italy says "buongiorno" to WiMAX
WiMAX, which has been an "any day now" type of technology for the last several years, continues its slow march to market. The Italian government has just announced that it is opening up a necessary bit of spectrum for WiMAX and will offer licenses for the band sometime in the first half of 2007, according to Reuters.
WiMAX will operate at 3.5GHz in much of the world, though not in the US, and the WiMAX Forum announced in January 2006 that it had certified the first WiMAX hardware for that band. To make space for the new technology, Italy has reassigned 3.4-3.6GHz from military use.
The move is expected to pull in a couple hundred million euros, a far cry from both Europe's past auctions for 3G cellular technology and the recent US auctions of cellular spectrum.
As WiMAX services are rolled out in Europe, the US, and South Korea (which has been developing its own service called WiBro) over the next few years, expect to see competition from traditional cell phone companies, which have already invested a fortune in building their own wireless voice and data networks. Nokia has already committed to the new technology by developing WiMAX handsets.
Critics have dismissed these grand WiMAX dreams as little more than hype and marketing dollars. Phones and laptop cards that combine well-tested technologies like WiFi and cellular could prove to be cheaper and more reliable in the short term, but we'll have to wait for large-scale deployments before making the call.
Fortunately for customers who like competition, companies like Clearwire have pulled in big sacks of cash and are racing to deploy WiMAX here in the US. Intel, which wants to provide the smarts for each piece of the data chain (production, transmission, consumption), has been aggressively pushing the technology and in fact is a major investor in Clearwire.
:source: Source: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061228-8516.html
