The adoption of WiMAX technology (a.k.a. 802.16d), a much-lauded superior step forward compared to its wireless Wi-Fi counterpart, has received somewhat of an acid knock back from one disgruntled corporate user this week, who labelled it as a “disaster.”
Buzz Broadband CEO accuses WiMAX of being a "disaster." Credit: WiMAX.
And that’s just one of many insults thrown the way of WiMAX by the CEO of Australian company Buzz Broadband, who also branded the next-gen wireless technology as a “miserable failure,” according to Wired News.
While a lack of similar negative feedback from other WiMAX’s users would perhaps suggest that Buzz Broadband’s experiences are the exception to the usage rule, CEO Garth Freeman was only too eager to swing his hobnail boots of dissatisfaction at WiMAX while attending the recent WiMAX conference in Bangkok, Thailand.
Australian telecom publication Commsday reports that Freeman unleashed his anti-WiMAX attack while addressing an international conference audience, claiming that the technology “may not work,” that it is “mired in opportunistic hype,” and that non-line of sight capabilities (which should be in the region of 20+ kilometres) are virtually “non-existent” beyond the 2 kilometre mark.
Freeman also claimed that indoor WiMAX performance reached only as far as a mere 400 metres and that latency rates (operational delays between transmissions) hit the region of 1,000 milliseconds, which is a near eternity when gauging the efficiency of data transfer rates.
Intel Corp., the world’s leading chipmaker, and telecommunications expert Sprint Nextel are two notable backers of WiMAX, having injected billions of dollars between them in order to suitably progress the wireless platform well beyond the boundaries of Wi-Fi.
While Freeman’s outburst will likely fail to sway the intent of corporate giants looking to embrace WiMAX, the platform does not enjoy sweeping support across the board. Specifically, the likes of AT&T and Verizon Wireless have chosen to place their support behind LTE, another wireless technology currently in development.
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