Even if you don’t know what means, it is going to change the rest of your life, whether you want it to or not.
WiMax and LTE are two competing technologies being rolled out into the real world to provide inexpensive “High Speed Internet Anywhere” service. This is similar to the VHS vs Betamax showdown, which VHS ultimately won, even though many people believe that Betamax was the better technology.
Sprint/Clearwire turned on WiMax this week (August 2009) in Atlanta, Las Vegas and Portland, Oregon. Sprint has about a six month lead on LTE, with several months of experience already in Baltimore. Sprint’s main partner is Comcast, which can help them with building out the transmitter network in a city and backhaul capability.
Most of the other forces are lined up behind LTE – AT&T and Verizon being the big players… but they are only now starting their pilot programs.
Once WiMax and/or LTE are widely deployed, cell phones will begin to use its IP based phone capabilities. The one area where WiMax has spent a lot of their effort is to ensure that a WiMax device in a car traveling at 60 MPH will work seamlessly as it hands off between cell towers. Time will tell if that gives it the edge over LTE.
But no matter which technology “wins”, the Internet being “everywhere” very inexpensively will change the use of computers and computer like devices just as much as cell phones have changed the telephone business.