myprofessorvoip blog

Professor says agree on a standard!

Why? Because volume means cheaper? What does that mean? Well riddle me this Batman, if the world is supposed to go wireless make it easy on my local Best Buy sales rep in being able to identify a solution for me when I ask him to find me a coverage for my roaming laptop. Don’t give him a map with colors on it that will cause him to give me poor information.

Wimax is the first to take off, with deployments ranging all over the 802.1G spectrum. It has a prominent provider of CPE based gear in Zyxel. It already has developed countries singing its praise. All accept the United States. The US does not have one competitor in agreement or where to go next. Granted LTE utilizes most of the current infrastructure as 3G networks go, however WIMAX should be the future for 4G. Not because it was the first to hit the market, but because it just plain made sense.

What ever is chosen, we should know that it will exist over a predominantly IP infrastructure. 3GPP standards hasn’t even agreed on a standard, but Wimax can overly a GSM wireless infrastructure and is ready to do so now. What is the hold up? I’m tired of ordering T1’s only to be raked over the coals of its expensive and ridiculous installation costs. I want to order a connection and have it provisioned just as easy as installing an access point in the 4th floor cafeteria.

I know that is a little naive and I may be a little biased, but I have participated in a Wimax deployment and it was a work of art. Granted Wimax is not without its problems, but I would happily sacrifice growing pains then be a part of the non scalable legacy copper provisioning that has been happening over the last quarter century.

As we stand now, AT&T and Verizon will participate in the When-will-we-have-a -standard LTE. While Sprint and whoever Sprint buys next well be participating in WIMAX. What does this mean? Expensive CPE equipment that does little to fix the mobility problem the US has today. One scenario is that the rest of the world follows Korea and goes Wimax and some of us will be stuck using American only phones. The other part of the equation would be higher CPE costs because of the limited distribution of the technology and the cost that competitors imposed to stay competitive. Meaning Sprint. 802.1G was supposed to be the answer for 4G why not all consolidate our resources to agree on one standard. Count chips after that.

Way to easy. If you want a comparison of the two technologies please go HERE

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Misc, Network, VOIP News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.