Though WiMax only made its major debut in the United States just over a year ago, providers, manufactures, and consumers are already looking at a new 802.16m standard.
Dubbed ‘WiMax 2′, this new standard is expected to receive final approval from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers this summer. Clearwire, the largest company offering commercial WiMax services, plans to test WiMax 2 in 2011 with hopes of deployment in 2012.
WiMax 2 will be backward compatible with 802.16e, the current WiMax standard in the U.S., meaning that when Clearwire upgrades to the new standard it will be at a relatively low cost with minimal disruption. WiMax 2 will be much faster than its predecessor and the new WiMax standard will deliver average downlink speeds of more than 100Mbps. These higher speeds will be delivered thanks to a combination of smart antenna technology and the use of a multi-channel apprach.
“Think of it like you’re building a 20-lane highway,” says Mohammad Shakouri, WiMax Forum president. “While it would be complicated to build out 20 lanes on the same highway, you could instead use two 10-lane highways or four five-lane highways. So this is how you can get higher data rates by using a combination of multiple channels.”
While WiMax 2 gives the technology a major speed boost, Shakouri has also said that it won’t propogate any farther than current technology that covers roughly 31 square miles per access point.
“The focus of 802.16m is on how to get a higher capacity data rate to the same amount of users today,” he explained.
The WiMax Forum is working on an 802.16m certification profile for developers that it hopes to have up ad running by the time IEEE finalizes the standard in September. If all goes according to plan, Shakouri says that we should start to see WiMax 2 devices hit the market one year later.
“The same thing happened with 802.16e, it took about a year after certification to get devices out,” he says. “So most of the industry expects you’ll be able to get network devices in the second half of 2011.”
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