Sprint & Motorola Demonstrate WiMax in Chicago

Sprint and Motorola chose the city of Chicago, and a ride on the river, to demonstrate the upcoming WiMax, or 802.16e wireless networking service. Sprint will call the service Xohm, a name that apparently was chosen by a marketing company for its sound, as it seems to have no basis in any technological process.

The announcement of the service in the summer stated that the service will be rolled out in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore in the first half of 2008. National service will follow.

The demonstration consisted of 12 laptops, and several cell phones using the service while the participants were traveling the Chicago River. Results were good, above the levels reported with Verizon’s EV-DO service.

What is not clear, and remains to be seen, is how well the service will work in the light of day, with more than a dozen or so users.

Works well when not busy, we will see when the network gets busy, later in 2008.

The ability of many devices to be WiMax enabled is a promise of service to those not able to get cable or DSL, but also it is designed to afford devices not currently networked, to be put upon a network for control and monitoring. (The example given was washing machines - not sure if this is needed, but it is interesting)

Perhaps a winner here will make some forget how poorly Sprint has done in the cellular business.

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[tags] Sprint, WiMax, Chicago, rollout, Intel, Motorola, FCC, spectrum allocation [/tags]