WiMAX will cover one billion people in 2011, coming soon to NYC and San Francisco
By Tim Stevens 
posted February 19th 2010 10:01AM
posted February 19th 2010 10:01AM
Thought WiMAX was just beaming high-speed internets to a very few lucky technosapiens in far-away lands? Think again! If all goes according to plan, more than 800 million people from the future will be wrapped in its soothing vibrations by the end of this year, and over a billion worldwide in 2011, surpassing expectations. That's an impressive spread given that Sprint just got things rolling domestically in Baltimore about a year and a half ago. Next up will be stops in New York City and San Francisco, good news for urban folks, but will it be enough to hold off the progression of LTE? Don't you love a good wireless format war? We don't.[Thanks, COCOViper]
WIMAX in NYC?!?!!?!??!!??!?!
YESSS!!!!!!!!!!!
@crawdad689 thank god this shoulda been the first place to begin with..
@crawdad689 WiMax bah HTML5 is the futur
WiMax in Chicago is not too hot, so I would take it with a grain of salt.
WiMAX needs to die and go away. LTE is so much better for companies and consumers it isn't funny.
Thanks Sprint for trying to keep carriers segmented on tech when Verizon finally agrees to follow the 3GPP like the rest of the world and use LTE.
@treats you made so many valid points. You should have stopped at 10.
How is LTE better? Looking at previous gen cell tech. GSM is used around most of the world. However, did you know, and this may shock you, that it's inferior to CDMA? CDMA had an upgrade path to 3G. GSM did not. That's why all of Verizon and Sprint network is 3g, while ATT is not. ATT makes big deal about being able to talk and surf the web. CDMA has it in the spec, however neither Sprint nor Verizon chose to enable it. Take a gander http://cdg.org/news/press/2009/Aug17_09.asp
one nice tidbit in there "The improvements, in theory, are capable of quadrupling the voice capacity of existing CMDA2000 1x networks. " I bet ATT users in NYC and SF would love to make phonecalls.
@xtasi what my post meant is that having multiple standards can be good. Since it drives competition. Qualcom works very hard on CDMA to keep it's customers
@xtasi I don't agree that competing formats are good for anyone, it's not competition and it costs companies billions. And if CDMA is so great then why isn't it the accepted format worldwide? In addition, phone manufacturers spend millions more having to make multiple versions of each of their phones as well. If it was just the companies competing using the same base equipment, the competition argument makes more sense.
VHS/Beta, BRD/HDDVD, GSM/CDMA/PCM = billions wasted. I'm sure I've missed dozens of other comparisons.
That was me!
Too bad it's not free
How many of these billion people will be in the US?
And what's wrong with a wireless format war?
@BigJayDogg3
It creates the same disparity that we have now btween CDMA and GSM. So wireless carriers GET those exclusivity contracts for handsets, you'll have to buy a new handset if you want to switch carriers, etc.
@BigJayDogg3
I believe Sprint announced 120 Million+ covered by the end of this year. They haven't said anything about how much more they intend to cover in 2011 though.
@crawdad689 There was an article on here maybe two days ago about Qualcomm or someone else preparing to release an LTE/WiMax dual mode chip. Put down your sword.
wifi... to the MAXXXXX!
@iroydude
A format war means ridiculous wasted effort and money. In a perfect world the industry would just adopt a standard and compete on service. Wireless format competition is like the different gauges used for rail lines a century ago.
So, is Sprint planning on moving 1 billion people into the Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco areas by 2011?
@MAS
You do know Sprint's US network is not even close to the only Wimax network right?
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/02/17/wimax-growth-in-the-us-lags-worldwide-growth-explodes/
Pffft, in 2 or 3 years there'll be a newer faster format that will start rolling out in select cities as well. I'm still waiting for widespread 3G coverage, and their already moving on to the next standard.
@nachotech
how long have you been with at&t?
@nachotech Exactly, AT&T is still rolling out EDGE towers for new coverage areas, while they are transitioning a few towers to 3G, while touting 4G/LTE as the "next big thing". I'm sure by the end of 2010 they will announce 5G/VLTE or something else new. 4-5 different incompatible technologies and standards to have to maintain, NONE of which cover the entire occupied land area of the US.
Haha, my tiny town of 50,000 got WiMax before NYC and San Francisco.
@jiggpig haha, you live in a crappy town with only 50,000 people.
@ravissimo
More people = better? Why?
@Abe crappy town = better....why? haha
Using and loving WiMax in Dallas! If you get the ClearSpot portable Wifi router (kind of like 3G Mifi), you only need to pay for ONE data plan and all of your Wifi devices can access the Internet at once.
@McBeese
Maybe in your part of Dallas. I live north of LBJ, right in the middle of a Clear area. Perfect reception for three weeks, then ZERO to 2 or 3 bars. Horrible, terrible partial reception. It ain't good!! They should stop selling it as covering the city when it is not even close.
New York and San Francisco, WOW, it's NATIONWIDE SERVICE! Never mind that NOWHERE in between has service AT ALL. What a crock!
@ggore
Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Austin, Boise, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Raleigh, and San Antonio all launched in addition to 20 other cities in 2009.
I think some of those are in between SF and NYC...
@COCOViper I didn't know Dallas had it. Oh well, it's 300 miles south to Dallas from here, so I don't think I'll ever have to worry about it. Like 3G coverage, a few little polka dots hundreds or thousands of miles apart does not constitute nation-wide coverage. That's the point I was trying to make.
I can stand outside my house in Dallas and see one Clear tower to the north and one to the south. I have terrible, unusable 4g reception between the two...and they say it is finished where I live, no more improvement. So I can't get too excited about such claims. It would be nice if they actually DID cover Dallas as they make you believe!
@CallDon I doubt that. Wireless companies don't make a habit of advertising their tower locations. Towers are sitting ducks for disgruntled employees and customers. These things would have to be heavily fortified or guarded if everyone knew what towers belong to what company.
@krosref
Study before you post. You can walk into any Clear store and see and interactive map of your location and every tower around you. They claim to "cover" an area even when they only have a few towers up!
@CallDon
On my hero you can shut off gps in google maps and it will show you were the nearest tower is.
To my knowledge some operators have already started to dismantle Wimax networks....
@cocoviper
In the link, Clear "has set a lofty goal of blanketing 120 million people by the end of 2010." What they omit is, that blanket is FULL OF HOLES filled with unhappy, former Clear customers who are not receiving usable 4g reception, not the great reception they are claiming to sell.
Why hate the wireless wars!? don't it push companies to their edge and limits? Don't we all benefit from the wars!?
@bystrika
No, the same reason we hated the HD disc war, neither was really that much better at anything and it just segments the market. Standards are what we want.
I DO!
Personally though as a former Clear user (in Raleigh, NC) I found that the service sucked a lot. Surfing the internet was painfully slow.
I'll wait for Verizon's ass to get FiOS out here or hopefully TWC will upgrade their service to FiOS like quality.
@TheLionOfAzzalle
Umm I hate to break this to you but... FIOS is not a wireless technology. Its a wired tech for the home competing with cable internet/tv/phone and DSL.
I hope you're not waiting for FIOS to give you wireless 4G coverage because you might be waiting forever.
Don't you love a good wireless format war? We don't.
In this case, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Both technologies are (theoretically) fast enough that choosing between one or the other won't drastically cripple you, which should hopefully foster some healthy competition for faster speeds and better coverage—something that has been lacking from the American wireless industry for a while now.
I thought WiMAX and LTE were merging into one. This is getting confusing and retarded like CDMA & GSM.
I thought WiMAX and LTE were merging into one. This is getting confusing and stupid like CDMA & GSM.
I swear to god, if this ends up being another HD-DVD/Blu war, I am gonna be piiised...
In 5 years WiMax will be dead, when AT&T, Verizon and Tmobile will have nationwide LTE coverage, when LTE will be deployed everywhere else in the world, when Nokia, HTC, Apple, and every other vendor will have a wide array of LTE handsets, when every netbook and slate will be LTE+802.11n enabled, when every laptop will have LTE chip as a standard.... WiMax will be WiWho???
@roman7927
You do know there are hundreds of Wimax deployments and over 600 million people covered already to only 1 production LTE network right?
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/02/17/wimax-growth-in-the-us-lags-worldwide-growth-explodes/
@roman7927 I never understood why people make such a huge deal out of CDMA not being as widespread as GSM in the world.
Like, really people. How many of you even leave your own city more then 10 times a year let alone your own country ever?
99% of the people that have a CDMA carrier don't really worry about what the rest of the world uses. WiMAX will do fine.
@dataninja Evidently you've never traveled any interstate highway in the US. They are FULL of people traveling from city to city, it's more economical than flying and far less hassle. And in every case, those people completely lose their cellphone service at some point on that trip, I don't care what two "major cities" you're traveling to/from.
@dataninja To me, another country is 15 minutes away. I go there semi-weekly when I feel like having a good kebab. This is why GSM won over CDMA and why LTE will win over WiMAX. Americans (who are the major backers of the failed systems) are very closed into their own country and don't realize how mobile the rest of the world is. GSM got huge largely thanks to its international interoperability and roaming capabilities, and the 3GPP are using that heritage to its advantage with LTE.
In my humble opinion, cell phone market drives the wireless standards, and not the laptops/netbooks. I also think that one vendor (clearwire/sprint) cannot define the winning wireless standrad. Yes, WiMax has more coverage now, but the actual % of users of wimax is very small, I bet.