After several years of a cable telephone duopoly in home broadband Internet service there may finally be an alternative on the Horizon. Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access better known as WiMax promises to do for communities what WiFi did for homes and businesses. There were previous broadband services using fixed-point wireless. Without the costs associated with building and maintaining a hardwired infrastructure fixed-point wireless should be an economical way to provide Broadband access. Many previous attempts haven't gone too far past being a niche player in the market place. There had never been a single standard that combined with the costs of expensive FCC wireless spectrum auctions and copious red tape make broadband over fixed wireless an expensive venture. Given the economy of scale, there was no chance of these previous technologies to come down in cost.
The WiMax standard will provide further competition to urban broadband market as an alternative to Cable and DSL. Secondly the WiMax has the potential to bring broadband service to small towns and rural areas that have been too difficult and costly for cable and telephone companies to serve.
With the potential to bring down the price of broadband to some and bring broadband for the first time to others there are issues that need to addressed for WiMax to reach it's potential. Firstly there have to be companies that can invest the big bucks needed to get WiMax networks off the ground. It would appear on the surface that cell phone carriers are the best positioned to be providers of WiMax based broadband services, but both the CDMA carriers (Verizon, Sprint, Bell Canada, Telus, Aliant & MTS) and GSM carriers (Cingular, T-Mobile, Rogers Wireless and Fido) have proprietary systems for providing broadband over their existing cell phone networks.
Broadcasting companies have the money but not only that but they also have a network of towers to hang WiMax antennas off of. Very few Americans can spin the radio dial and not hit a station owned by Clear Channel communications. However broadcasting companies have been shortsighted in their view of the Internet seeing only competition and not an opportunity.
AOL would be another possible provider of WiMax based broadband. The once dominant provider had at it's height had about 35,000,000 subscribers most of which have migrated to Cable or DSL. In recent years TimeWarner has allowed AOL to wither away to a mere shadow of what it once was. It would be hard to say if TimeWarner would allow AOL develop a WiMax based broadband service since TimeWarner already has several million cable modem subscribers.
Since it has been rumored that the current Goliath of technology world, Google is looking to enter the business of providing Internet access, WiMax would be the perfect technology for a broadband service provided by Google. Google is already invested into broadband provider Current Communications Group which is finally set to roll out a broadband service over power lines.
No matter who ends up being the providers of WiMax based broadband, one of the biggest costs is the cost building towers, however there are plenty radio communications towers where space could be rented. Cities, towns and counties have towers for two-way radio communications systems. That's how municipalities should make money off of wireless broadband, not this WiFi cloud garbage that is being bandied about.
Before consumers reap the benefits that WiMax, potential providers will still have to get licenses from FCC, which could help get as much competition into the market by charging a fixed license fee instead of auctioning which practically helped kill previous attempts of companies to provide broadband using other types of fixed wireless technology.