Peter Wayner has a story about a WiMax rollout in Baltimore in the US. They seem to be getting 6 Mb/s download and 1 Mb/s upload. This is termed a `4G' network (which might just be marketing speak).
In India, Thomas K. Thomas has an article on price cuts by Airtel. My sense is that we're in for a big crash in prices of bandwidth through a combination of improvements in prices of wired services and the rollout of 3G which is now a credible alternative to land lines.
The exciting new development on mobile bandwidth is the CDMA EVDO devices being sold by Reliance and Tata Indicom. Last night I did a bulky upload and it worked at 350 kb/s without interruptions. Naman Pugalia and Alok Parekh are measuring the performance of Reliance and Tata Indicom at locations all over India. The picture so far is that EVDO is a lot better than dialup (or CDMA 1.x) but it ain't really fast.
The EVDO devices are not that great compared to what Wimax is doing. A lot of people, including myself, have moved to Wimax in the past 6-months. And both Reliance and Indicom have rock-solid services on that front. The best part? No last-mile issues. You just need line-of-sight to a nearby tower.
ReplyDeletewimax doesnt have the support of the big vendors/telcos in 3gpp2. it is likely to be marginalized
ReplyDeleteI have been a customer Sify--->Bsnl--->Tata Wimax ---> Airtel
ReplyDeleteTata Wimax was good for the line of sight solutions they are offering , there customer care was pathetic, switched to Airtel on first instance Airtel got into our colony.
Still i am waiting for something like http://www.railwire.in/ , even with 1:4 ratio tariff plans looks unbelievable.Still havent got a feedback about there Network and Support.