Idea Center

Companies have been debating the success of WiMax and its end consumer reach. In countries like India, where I live, the last mile of connectivity has always proved a challenge. WiMax has been able to bridge this gap with a good number of service providers bridging this with WiMax. With corporate connections moving to WiMax for infrastructure and cost reasons, this has been a positive trend. In short it means you have a good number of WiMax service providers.

 While as a road warrior, when I take a look at Internet access while I'm driving, even inside a city, I am presented with GPRS or CDMA web connectivity. For WiMax, I don't get too many high-end laptops with WiMax connectivity and have to resort to USB pluggable options which are available, but then getting a service plan is hard.

I found that the idea of WiFi to WiMax roaming was discussed as early as a year back in February 2008. This seems significant because Intel is also looking at chips that make this roaming possible without you having to run two RF intensive devices. So here's what they had out of their labs.

Finally, I found that the need being strong and market driven, there's a lot more comprehensive information you can gather about this. Here's www.wimaxroaming.org which has details about roaming from one service provider's WiMax to another (not something I have been addressing in the earlier paragraphs.) This too is key as GPRS/GSM or CDMA roaming is defined and works depending on yoru service plans.

The only thing that looks a bit daunting is the size of the USB WiMax dongles. They are versatile (if you've worked on WiMax before), but not the kind of size an end user would like for a laptop. My bother is also about the power consumption.

With one PCMCIA or usually ExpressCard slot these days, you could  have your GPRS/CDMA/EDGE card plugged in there.

With most of the computing needs moving into Web 2.0 with a lot of software content, the cloud applications (here's Google's Cloud if you're interested in further reading;) seamless web connectivity needs solutions.

The solutions sought for are

• In Part the Hardware that could possibly accommodate multi-band radios for GSM/GPRS/EDGE/CDMA/WiFi bg/WiMax
• The Software that keeps you connected managing your network for whichever Operating System you use.

While most companies are working at converging these, few have brought in consumer adaptable solutiions here.