bdsams Veteran Posted February 9, 2007 Veteran Share Posted February 9, 2007 My University (www.bsu.edu) has been lucky enough to be the first implementation of Wimax in the U.S.A (Source) and I have been using it since September of 2006. When I was first became aware that my campus would be the first to implement this technology I was quite happy as an end user. My first thoughts were to review what WiMax really was and how I was going to benefit. To be frank, WiMax boasts up to a 30 mile range (ba da bing!) but i took this with a grain of salt as I'm sure the specs of this technology were bolstered by a marketing department along its way to my school. Ive got the need...the need for speed! WiMax is proving to be a great technology! The first thing i noticed was a vast improvment of being able to login to the campus internet well off of campus. I was used to having a campus blanketed by Wifi as my school was rated by Intel as the "least wired campus" (Source). What I was not expecting though were the download rates. Speed and Range I used a folder conataining 100 mbs for testing the speed of the downloads. There is one Wimax acess point for my entire campus consisting of 22k students (enrollment) albeit not all are connected to the Wimax point at one time but you can guess that there are quite a few people using the same point on/off campus at any given moment in time. I prepared a bar graph chart to show my downloads of this file at different ranges All across campus I was able to achieve an average of 13 mbps. Extending the range out resulted in less speed as one would naturally think. At approx 4 miles away from the acess point i was getting marginal speeds of 1 meg max on a hill to 200k not in line of sight. The WiMax is currently running on the "3.5 gigahertz-wave frequency...that is the same frequency the U.S. military uses, Smitherman said. The university will then test WiMAX at a 2.5 gigahertz frequency" (Source) Im saddend to see it leaving us at the 3.5 wave range as I know how trusty and very reliable the signal can be; although I will be doing similar tests possible on the 2.5 wave range to compare. Conclusion: Overall I am extremely satisfied with the technology, heck im using it right now at about a 2 mile range from my apartment (hooray for not having to pay for my own interwebs!). I cant wait to see this technology spread across the country and be applied into more applications as it is a great new technology! Review By Netrack @ Neowin.Net Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zivan56 Posted February 9, 2007 Share Posted February 9, 2007 Would 2.5 Ghz not be better due to being able to penetrate walls better? 3.5 Ghz sounds useless if this is in a non-suburban area. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bdsams Veteran Posted February 9, 2007 Author Veteran Share Posted February 9, 2007 Im not sure, its a decently populated campus/town, if it penetrates better then all the better, although 3.5 has no trouble at the current moment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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