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A comment on The Linux Kernel Looks to Eventually Drop Support for WiMAX.

Re:The Linux Kernel Looks to Eventually Drop Support for WiMAX by johnwalkr on Thursday October 29, 2020 @01:28AM (#24927549)
WiMax is still pretty popular in Japan, although some of the bands have been dropped for other uses, and speed is lower than it used to be. I used a WiMax wifi router up until a few months ago. I only got rid of it because of covid; I'm not out of the house much. It was under $10 a month for almost unlimited usage (mine was supposed to throttle after 10GB used in 3 days but in practice it didn't). While slow (generally 10Mbps), it was nice to have always-available internet without worrying about finding coffee shop wifi or using my limited smartphone data for tethering.

This news is about dropping support for a specific WiMax chip. It shouldn't affect many current users who would be using a discrete wifi device that connects by wifi or USB.

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Re:The Linux Kernel Looks to Eventually Drop Support for WiMAX by fomine3 on Thursday October 29, 2020 @01:56AM (#24927691)
No, WiMAX service in Japan was ended. Currently a service called "WiMAX 2+" is operated by same operator, but it's actually just a TD-LTE, zero compatible to WiMAX.
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Re:The Linux Kernel Looks to Eventually Drop Support for WiMAX by johnwalkr on Thursday October 29, 2020 @05:21AM (#24928605)
I stand corrected!

The branding is pretty confusing. My device/plan had HS mode which is apparently WiMax 2+/TD-LTE, and HS+A mode which is normal LTE and much faster. And, use of the much faster HS+A mode was limited to 7GB per month. Once you go over 7GB, the speed of both modes is throttled to 128kbps for the rest of the month.

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Re:The Linux Kernel Looks to Eventually Drop Support for WiMAX by agurk on Thursday October 29, 2020 @08:05AM (#24929597)
The outdated wikipedia page for WiMAX[0] has been updated with the uncited statement:

The latest version of WiMAX, WiMAX release 2.1, popularly branded as/known as WiMAX 2+, is a backwards-compatible transition from previous WiMAX generations. It is compatible and interoperable with TD-LTE.

Does this mean that WiMAX 2.1 can talk to an original WiMAX network also also talk to an unrelated TD-LTE one as well?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX

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Re:The Linux Kernel Looks to Eventually Drop Support for WiMAX by ncmncm on Thursday October 29, 2020 @09:02AM (#24930024)
My bet is that the device can be operated by an old WiMax driver, with maybe the same pinout, to make transitioning old designs to continue working in an LTE-only world with just a part substitution and some new config details.
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