Wireless Observer wireless technology observer

"Standards work will be completed by the end of this year," said Rama Shukla, a vice president and director of the WiMAX program office at Intel, during a news conference in Taipei. Intel has been a major corporate backer of the WiMAX ecosystem and is a main financial supporter of Taiwan's VMAX Telecom, which just launched a unique consumer experience trial today in Taipei. By partnering with a leading taxicab company, commuters in the capitol city now have access to 1000 WiMAX-enabled cabs. The new Mobile WiMAX standard, 802.16m, will replace 802.16e and offer far faster download and upload speeds. The new technology will support 170 Mbps download speed and 90 Mbps upload speeds, according to Intel data, and will be fully backward compatible with 802.16e. Users will be able to use the service even while traveling at speeds up to 350 kilometers per hour, Shukla said. The IEEE is expected to provide final approval for this new standard sometime this summer. And Clearwire, the largest company to offer commercial WiMAX services in the United States, has said it plans testing 802.16m sometime next year in the hopes of deploying it in 2012, according to an article in PC world in January. "Work on the standard has been progressing very quickly," said Jose Puthenkulam, Intel's director of WiMAX standards in a WiMax.com interview in February. "The profile development time for 802.16m has been much shorter than with the prior, 802.16e profile - where the industry was still very much in a formulative state with respect to MIMO, beamforming, etc. We have taken the experiences with 802.16e and even some of the learnings from LTE and built that into the 802.16m standard." Shukla said that this year, estimates for the number of global WiMAX subscribers range from around 6 million to 10 million, led by users in the U.S., Russia and Japan. Most of those users are turning to mobile WiMAX for laptop computer use. "We see very strong momentum [for WiMAX] in notebook PCs today," he said in his interview with Nystedt. Of all the WiMAX member companies, none has been more vocal in their commitment to 802.16m than Samsung and Russian WiMAX operator Yota. Last October at the ITU World conference, Yota and Samsung demonstrated a test of an 802.16m network and Yota plans to be one of the first operators in the world to install the technology once it becomes available. As one of the fastest growing WiMAX operators in the world, Yota can certainly use the extra capacity. In one month alone last year, the service provider carried over 2,290 terabytes of data on its network. To learn more about this new standard, see WiMax.com's article: WiMAX Act2: 8021.16m Provides Evolution Path to 4G.