WiMAX equipment and year 2007

The year 2007 will therefore be critical for the development of WiMAX, a wireless technology built on the foundation of the IEEE 802.16 family protocols. 802.16 uses the same logical link control standard as 802.11 and 802 standards, but unlike 802.11, which uses a contention-based MAC (Media Access Control) protocol, 802.16's MAC is a scheduled MAC, where each node gets a predefined time slice. Aggregate performance is claimed to be up to 70Mbps, but this varies depending on implementation. Borrowing on the success of Wi-Fi, the companies behind WiMAX, led by Intel, have developed a certification program that should assure users of at lease basic multivendor, and interoperability. That should certainly stimulate significant market competition and lower prices in the wireless industry, un-enabling WiMAX to supplant Wi-Fi or 3G, at least for the next several years. The real fun in the WiMAX market will happen through out the year 2007 when mobile WiMAX, based on the 802.16e standard, begins to appear. Mobile WiMAX, when coupled with VoIP, could alter the WWAN landscape, replacing existing cellular phone WWAN systems. This is something that most of us need to worry about throughout the year 2007.