WiMax to take its own sweet time to catch on

Since no tech analysts have ever been wrong about these things before, we all have no choice but to accept at face value the prediction by research firm Park Associates that WiMax is going to take a long time to achieve that oh-so-coveted critical mass (lest we have you running for your glossary, WiMax is like a long-distance version of WiFi with a range of up to a few miles). They're estimating that there will only be 7 million subscribers to WiMax services worldwide by 2009. 7 million might seem like a lot of people, but that will seem like a drop in the proverbial bucket compared with the over a billion people who are expected to have cellphones by 2009 or the hundreds of millions who are expected to have broadband (there are already over a hundred million broadband subscribers globally right now). Anyway,
while we're on the topic a slow adoption rate for WiMax could also spell trouble for Intel, which somewhat optimistically has been talking about putting 802.16e, a version of WiMax for mobile devices, into their laptops beginning in 2006.