http://wimaxsurvival.com/

here:

http://www.wimaxforum.org/home/

or here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX

You can't be me, I'm taken

yes, like Migeru asks...how much will this cost (though I'm sure it will ge cheaper in time...)

Half the population is under the age of 18. Tanzania's future is NOW...join the 50% campaign!

please post, someone, if there are petitions to sign to keep the corporate paws from blocking this.

or will it be seen as just like ham radio, with more bells 'n' whistles'?

the potential for human services, caring for elderly at home, and webcam medical visits (say aagh!) should be immense.

perhaps this appeal to compassion will serve to wedge the censorship door from closing.

perhaps if they succeed in drm-ing every new computer, then they would trust that hi-wi-fi wouldn't immediately bankrupt hollywood and the record companies; till then i'd be pleasantly surprised if there isn't very stiff opposition.

this roll-out could also serve to help revitalise rural communities, presently emptying out in the migrations to the cities, because of boredom and lack of economic opportunity.

Peace is not the absence of war -- peace is the absence of fear. Ursula Franklin

The trick would be to produce programming people want to watch/listen to regularly, day after day, after day, after day.  It's not easy.  

And then there is the sheer time it takes to produce a Visual Broadcast image.  For 'on the scene' reporting it's between 2 and 4 hours (IIRC) to produce 1 to 3 minutes of On-Air Time.  That is why most news shows spend most of the On-Air TIme focused on the News Anchor(s).  The next time you watch a major news outlet time the actual reporting and the time on the News Anchor(s).  

Other shows have an even higher production/1 minute Air Time ratio.  The only saving grace is the production of different episodes can be done in parallel.  

The US major networks want a show to run 40, +/- a bit, minutes per broadcast hour.  That gives them an incredibly annoying 20 minutes/hour to run those damn ads for stuff which also off-loads the cost of production of that air time to the advertisers. This would have to be checked by someone more marketing savvy than I but: My feeling is advertisers would pay the same for a smaller audience per ad/Air Time if they knew their message would be seen by more eyeballs per ad/Air Time - cut down the frickin' ad time to 2 or 3 minutes per break.  So even though you have a smaller audience a large enough revenue stream can be gotten?  Maybe?  

You have to get money coming in as you have to pay people involved otherwise they will quit.  Most TV work is long hours of a boring grind and the only way to keep your competent, creative, people is to give them enough money to compensate.  A friend who worked on a TV show had to be on-set by 5:00 AM and wouldn't get home until 10:00 or 11:00 PM at night.  He would do that for 7 months of the year and physically recover during the other 5 months.  Those are not uncommon hours for the crew of a show working the shoot or doing post-production.

A significant advantage WiMax offers is the combination of TV, Radio, Film, Print, and Internet from the start.  This not only avoids the faction fighting between each medium it also means you have one management structure not fivd management structures.  It sounds silly but the major media companies are drowning from the expense of their own bureaucracy and turf battles.  

My 2 cents.


Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!

I really have to learn about posting graphics and urls. I can outgraph Jeome (sans accents), any day

You can't be me, I'm taken

The dev proposal includes four components, one of which is improved Internet communications.  That means WiMax.  WiFi is too limited in range to work up a mesh of users in a sparsely populated user environment such as Ukraine.  Users in near-proximity to each other, maybe 100 meters apart, are needed to spread a WiFi signal and make connection with the Internet backbone.  There aren't enough here yet, not least due to Ukraine's preventing the use of wireless Internet.  With WiMax, one user can be 20 km or more from the backbone and still reach it without any other users being involved.

The main problem is the cost.  Customer premises equipment (CPE) for WiMax is around $400, compared to a dial-up modem cost of about $20.  Very few people can afford $400 for what amounts to a wireless modem, hence the proposed dev component to subsidize costs and get things going in regions of Ukraine (at least 90% of the country) where broadband won't otherwise reach for at least a decade, probably longer.

Further, in a curious holdover from Old Ukraine and Soviet times, wireless communications of all types are tightly restricted, requiring time and money and paperwork and documents and stamps and chocolate and cognac to get permissions, money being the main ingredient.  That in turn cuts down on services not delivered by land lines, most of the latter controlled and owned by Ukrtelecom.  (That's probably the main point of impeding wireless communications.)

In Ukraine, cost and politics stand in the way of WiMax (and WiFi, for that matter.)  In the US and Western Europe, cost will continue to be a factor until CPE costs drop below $100 per user (based on extensive broadband research I and a colleague did for this dev proposal in UK.)  Politics also impede, such as in Philadelphia where a publicly funded and owned MAN (metropolitan area network) for low-cost broadband is being challenged by existing service providers and their in-pocket politicians.

WiMax is a great idea, and will likely become a common deployment standard, if the not THE standard, over time.  It's not quite there yet.  But the principle is sound, and should be just a matter of time.  Going over  top of existing wire infrastructure is sure to present some messy, costly fights along the way, because wired infrastructure runs the risk of being rendered as obsolete as an 80286 PC.

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The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
W. Churchill

what a juicy thread... i love the rate of comment flow on this site right now. it's as relaxed as a bunch of folks could be.

 i know it'll be great for this site to grow, and uncover new gifted diarists, but i'm still having sleepless nights trying to keep up with the firehose that is dkos....enquiring insomniacs want to see what info-overload really means, and coming here is like stumbling across of mellow pensionati, playing and contemplating a leisurely game of boules!

whew!

slow food, now slow blogging.

back on topic:

this wimax thing: after p2p, this is the next big cat to climb out of the bag, it looks like.

it must drive the control freaks c-r-a-z-y

bring it on; i've surely stopped believing the lies about broadband rollout from my local telecom, sigh.

Peace is not the absence of war -- peace is the absence of fear. Ursula Franklin