Overview

This book describes the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) standard 802.16, more popularly known as Worldwide Interoperability for Micro Wave Access, or WiMAX. The standard, which was years in the making, was finalized in June 2004. This book will attempt to give a brief technical overview of the standard per the specification, followed by a series of discussions of how the technology can deliver the triple play of data, voice, and video.

WiMAX will change telecommunications, as it is known throughout the world today. It eradicates the resource scarcity that has sustained incumbent service providers for the last century. As this technology enables a lower barrier to entry, it will allow true market-based competition in all of the major telecommunication services: voice (mobile and static), video, and data.

Since the inception of the telephone, service providers have staved off competition by relying on the exorbitant capital investment necessary to deploy a telephone network. The cost of deploying copper wires, building switches, and connecting the switches created an insurmountable barrier to entry for other competitors. In most of the world, the high cost of this infrastructure limited telephone service to the wealthy and the fledgling middle class.

WiMAX offers a point-to-point range of 30 miles (50 km) with a throughput of 72 Mbps. It offers a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) range of 4 miles and, in a point-to-multipoint distribution, the model can distribute nearly any bandwidth to almost any number of subscribers, depending on subscriber density and network architecture. Figure...