Easier said than done. It might be workable in dense urban areas where there are already lots of tall buildings, but getting approval to build towers in many residential areas is like pulling teeth. To support peak usage hours when everyone is at home HD streaming hulu and netflix, even with WiMax, you will need way more (i.e. smaller) cells than wireless carriers have today, which means lots more towers. Plus you'll need fiber going to all of these small cell towers, which means you're half way to FTTN anyway.
I think wireless internet might fit some niche situations well, but I'm skeptical there is significant capital or long terms savings in the general case. Not to mention that it will never be able to compete with fiber on latency or bandwidth.
I played the WiMAX game in the US as a consumer. If you didn't have clear line of site with the tower, you got terrible speeds if you still had a connection.
Driving + WiMAX was a no go unless it was through an empty field (never got to try this one). Using WiMAX near a window and getting up for some coffee was a no go. Hell, being outside that pane of glass made a huge difference.
It was really bad for mobile.
> You can roll out fast broadband to large areas just by building a few towers to broadcast WiMAX.
I can see this working if customers had outdoor antennas installed.
Maybe I'm wrong though?
I'd be interested to know why we aren't talking about four different technologies, with the fourth one being wireless.
You can roll out fast broadband to large areas just by building a few towers to broadcast WiMAX. There's no "backhoe time" and you avoid the cost of digging up the streets.
IEEE 802.16m will now give you a gigabit to a fixed point
You could do the same with LTE but you need a lot more towers and I don't know about spectrum availability.
However, WiMAX seems to have failed in the US, with Clearwire shutting down in March...