Continued:

Imagine the sheer convenience that victims of Hurricane Katrina had when they were allowed to use that single WiMax system lying in some godforsaken area. It worked when there was a crisis and that by itself is a valuable benchmark. When it boils down to testing technology, there’s no better way than crisis situations (as unfortunate as that sounds) because if it can come out smelling like Roses under worst circumstances, it’ll more or less work perfectly well under normal conditions.

To give you a brief overview of WiMax, it’s an upgrade from Wi-Fi and offers brilliant advantages over its predecessor. The obvious one being extended range (up to 15 miles), which means that establishing a few towers would pretty much make the entire city connected. Now this probably won’t matter to those of us with 24/7 connectivity, but people living in rural and undeveloped areas would surely benefit from it.

It’ll also be affordable for ISPs to set up base stations in order to provide Internet access to places where it’s difficult and/or expensive to reach and construct an infrastructure of cabling.

Yes, WiMax is still experimental, but a timely successful demo during Hurricane Katrina calamity cemented its place firmly in everyone’s minds as a serious contender for implementing citywide networks.

Of course, not everyone is towing Intel’s line on this, and there are companies like Verizon that are promoting their own version of high speed mobile Internet (3G services). The problem with proprietary services, however, is that the protocols and devices are not cross compatible where as WiMax is a single unified standard, which is structured to work on pretty much any device conforming to its standards, and similar to USB, AGP and now PCI-e, Intel will ensure compliance.

With WiMax becoming mainstream, all speculation above regarding the various ways of sourcing content (read streaming) seem more plausible and will, in all probability, be less tedious to use.

WiMax is the future of wireless networking, and there’s no doubt that it’ll make life easier and more productive for manufacturers and end users alike.