WiMAX slapfight gets underway

It's funny: While Apple is wrangling with trying to decide when it's going to release a 3G cell phone, the rest of the mobile industry is working on getting 4G (the most promising type of which is WiMAX) ready for prime time. In many circles, 3G is already getting to be a bit dated, with not quite enough bandwidth for high-def TV broadcasting or full-speed mobile-to-mobile videoconferencing, some of the industry's most anticipated upcoming mobile features. The solution: Another giant leap forward to the realm of double-digit throughput.

But WiMAX has had more than its share of problems since it was originally described in 2001. Now, things have come to a head, with one Australian WiMAX company calling the technology a "miserable failure" and abandoning its WiMAX investment altogether. WiMAX has been touted as potentially offering speeds of 70Mbps over a range of several miles, but Australia's Buzz Broadband says that wasn't the case, claiming that its experience saw signal dropouts in less than 1 1/2 miles if there was any obstruction between base station and user, with latencies of up to a full second, making it wholly useless for voice communications.

The rest of the industry has responded in defiance, saying that Buzz's experiences are not surprising given the newness of the technology and that the kinks will get worked out. Ars Technica quotes an Accenture executive as noting that even venerable CDMA had problems when it was first rolled out in Korea, but now it's working without issue.

Still, early American WiMAX tests, while they have worked well enough, haven't shown speeds much faster than those that current 3G networks offer. Is that because Sprint's Xohm, as America's biggest WiMAX project is known, is still in beta, or because we're facing some real limits as to what the technology will do? Time will tell.