Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) / WiMAX Stories

"White Space" Devices Get Black Marks From FCC

From ars technica
By Nate Anderson
August 1, 2007

The FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology issued a report late yesterday that gave negative marks to current attempts at building a personal "white space" receiver and transmitter. Such a device could open up the empty spaces in the television spectrum for unlicensed wireless broadband, unleashing a surge of creativity and innovation that could make WiFi look as attractive as a 900MHz cordless phone. That is, so long as such a device actually works.

On the day that the switch over to digital television broadcasts is finalized in early 2009, companies could be free to sell unlicensed devices that can send and receive information in whatever parts of the television spectrum are unused in a given location (well, except for channels 37 and 52-69), so long as they meet FCC engineering criteria. Because the low frequencies used by over-the-air television signals are able to cover great distances and penetrate walls with ease, they theoretically provide a perfect place to deploy wireless broadband technologies over great distances—without having to purchase a chunk of licensed spectrum at auction.

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Full story at:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070801-white-space-devices-get-black-marks-from-fcc.html

(Lead for this story from Dewayne Hendricks posting to the Dewayne-net mailing list.)

The MeshMAX Combo

From Wi-Fi Planet - www.wifiplanet.com

By Eric Griffith
February 6, 2007

Proxim Wireless this week released a new product to take on the other mesh providers by incorporating not just Wi-Fi for client access and mesh connections to extend the network, but also WiMax for backhaul. The three-radio unit is called MeshMAX.

"We've seen in a majority of deployments that municipalities and providers have a need for backhaul connectivity," says Geoffrey Smith, head of marketing and product management for Proxim. "It either isn't where they need it, or at too low a data rate." Their solution is to build in the WiMax support for both licensed (3.3 to 3.6 GHz) and unlicensed (5.1 to 5.8 GHz) radio frequencies, whatever the provider may want.

Full story at:
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/3658276

(Lead for this story from Glenn Fleishman writing in WiMAX Networking News, via RSS.)