Despite WiMax’s advances, WiFi still rules the day (for now)
Although WiMax technology has made some serious in-roads over the past few months, it still will be a while before it overtakes WiFi.
According to an In-Stat study, one of the main reasons why WiFi will remain the big man on campus for the foresseable future is that there are hundreds of millions of devices in existence that have WiFi technology embedded in them, and both the business and personal wireless market sectors will not be so apt to change so quickly, no matter how much better WiMax is either perceived or proven to be.
In addition, WiMax equipment is priced about the same or a little higher than WiFi, so economically there is no incentive to switch. Of course, once the technology sees any mass deployments, that will certainly change. Plus, WiMax’s range dwarves WiFi’s, but let’s see it work consistently in a metropolitan setting before the WiFi equipment is ditched.
But let’s not be naive–WiMax will enter the marketplace on a wide scale soon, and we then can assess (or re-assess) it’s impact.
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