Battle for wireless communication methods

The stage is set for a battle of wireless standards as seen by the excellent posts by my classmates Sunny and Chris.  As we move towards greater mobility and smaller gadgets great display capabilities, there’s a battle of how we get the information on our cellphones, smart phones, iPod Touches, iPhones, Google G1, PDAs, and Wireless Laptops.  Two of the contenders come in the form of WiMAX, a distant relative of WiFi standards today, and 3G wireless, from the technology we use in cellphones now. 

WiMAX (from Sunny McSherry)

http://sunnysforecast.blogspot.com/2008/09/wimax-goes-to-baltimore.html

3G Wireless (from Chris)

http://bmw1blog.blogspot.com/2008/09/mobile-broadband-and-our-pdas.html

 

How can we compare these standards?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wimax.svg

The success of these competing standards relies on 2 main contention points, Mobility vs. Speed and Adoption/Infrastructure. 

The first (as illustrated above) is the tradeoff between speed of the communication and the mobility of the user.  As an example, if I know exactly  where I need an internet connection, I can run a wire to the exact location and have all the bandwidth I am willing to pay for (just adding more wires, or different technologies like fiber).  This is very high speed, with low mobility, since I can’t stretch the wire too much. If you wish to have a little more mobility at the location, perhaps an office with moving workers, you can install a WiFi access point.  However, the range is limited, and there is a decline in speed, down from standard 100 Mbit/s for wired down to a max of 54 Mbit/s in wireless.  Efforts are being made to improve the wired and wireless speeds to double their current capacities, widening the gap between it and mobile phone data transmission standards.  3G wireless is stated to be able to hit 2 Mbit/s but experience slower speeds when the user is moving (like in a car).   Closeness to relay points also increases speed.

However, Speed and Mobility is not the only concern. The installed infrastructure and user base clearly aid 3G and it’s future versions in winning the battle of high speed mobile data communication.  Both sides have major players supporting them, WiMAX: Intel, Samsung, and Sprint… 3G (and higher): Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, and Qualcomm (Source: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=556).  While there’s only been a few deployments of WiMAX (Baltimore recently, a few areas in Asia, especially Taiwan, who has had $500 million pledged by Intel in support of a roll out there). It’s still questionable though how much it is going to take to make it successful in the US.   Supporters have lined up in the last year to throw their money into the battle totalling over $3 billion for Xohm + Clearwire to provide WiMAX in the US.,  (http://gigaom.com/2008/05/06/clearwire-wimax-32-billion/, and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121010437224271501.html)