Ah, here comes the hardware support for WiMAX. It seems that Intel believes that WiMAX is the ‘next big thing’ and plans to fully support it with their wares. I will be interested to see just what direction this takes and if this move by Intel to really push their support for it will sway any naysayers.

WiMAX backers continue to seed early versions of the technology among prospective customers, hoping that it will spark demand when services roll out in early 2006.

In the latest example, Intel has provided the U.K.’s National Museum of Science and Industry an early WiMAX deployment for its reserve warehouses, which sit on an abandoned airfield near Intel’s offices in Swindon, Wiltshire.

A WiMAX antenna sits atop the 7 hangars currently in use by the museum, connected wirelessly to the base station housed in Intel’s Swindon offices. Inside each of the hangars, six Wi-Fi access points allow museum employees to roam between the hundreds of exhibits in storage, entering data on a Tablet PC.

Although hundreds of companies are members of the WiMAX Forum, including Intel, Alvarion Ltd., Atheros, France Telecom, Fujitsu, LG Electronics, Samsung, Sanyo and others, WiMAX isn’t a done deal. A number of companies including Broadcom, Cisco Systems, and large national telecom carriers are shying away from WiMAX in favor of what they feel are more developed wireless standards, such as wideband CDMA and HSDPA. Cisco, meanwhile, has staked out a more independent position, participating in the WiMAX Forum but indicating in a carefully nuanced statement that the company has no plans to build WiMAX base stations or any other base stations using WAN technology, favoring Wi-Fi instead.

Intel sees the technology as a wireless replacement for DSL or cable, offering 70-Mbits per second of a distance of 30 kilometers, with bandwidth dropping off the farther out the signal has to travel. Although Intel often shows the technology with a single antenna serving an entire metropolitan area, the reality is that traffic restrictions will probably limit a single antenna to a village housing a few thousand people, equipment makers have said.

Still, the technology is ideal for rural poor areas such as Africa, said Gordon Graylish, director of marketing for the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions. “The reality is that if you put copper wiring in the ground in certain places