WiMAX Coming Soon to a Laptop Near You?

Wi-Fi is everywhere. Executives are now able to surf the net in hotel lobbies, and mom and pop entrepreneurs operate small businesses at coffee shops. There is one major issue though with Wi-Fi. A short range of just a few hundred yards. WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) does not suffer from this limitation. Indeed, a transmitting station can saturate 3000 square miles of hip city streets or remote rural farmland with 72 Mbps of juicy wireless goodness.

Right now with Wi-Fi, if you leave a hotspot you can't stay online. Now imagine leaving Starbucks, driving 3 miles out of the city and not losing your connection once. This is possible thanks to WiMAX.

Will this technology ever take off in a market stuffed like the proverbial Thanksgiving Turkey with 3G and HSDPA technology? Heavyweight Intel seems to think so, and have promised to offer a WiMAX chipset for their new Montevina upgrade. That means all new Centrino laptops will be WiMAX compatible in 2008.

Other companies are also showing their WiMAX love. ClearWire are about to release the world's first WiMAX access laptop card which fits neatly into a standard Type II card slot. ClearWire's product will be compatible with Windows Vista and Windows XP, and should arrive in the summer of 2008.

So will WiMAX towers soon be springing up all over the place? Well some companies are hesitant to sink money into WiMAX as they've already invested huge sums into the development of 3G and HSDPA networks. But with Intel throwing their gargantuan frame behind Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, others will soon follow suit.

I'm hoping this new wireless technology will be more secure than Wi-Fi was when it first hit the market. Do you recall the epidemic of phishing stories at hotspots? I wouldn't want hackers accessing my confidential Daniel O' Donnell Mp3 collection through a dodgy WiMAX connection.
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