Bad food, good quotes, and WiMax

March 28, 2007

2 Min Read
Generic Tradeshow Blog™

12:45 PM -- Hello, and Greetings from CTIA.

First item: Let's get the garbage out of the way. Here are the required items for our Completely Generic Trade Rag Blog™:

  • Boy, gosh, does this food ever suck.

  • Funny, it's a wireless show but the wireless technology is completely dodgy. Heh.

  • Orlando and Las Vegas must have been designed by twin architects separated at birth, because they both consist of nothing more than strip malls and hotels creating 2-mile-long city blocks.

Okay, that's done. Now there is some of this wireless stuff going on -- WiFi, WiMax, CDMA, HSDPA, STP, 3G, 4G, 9.9G, PDDSHHRev3... whatever. I can tell you with authority that this is what's happening:

  • WiMax has been overhyped, Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) tells us. Senior marketing manager Steve Jenkins says it may play better as a technology for backhaul than mobile access. But in the end, he says, the business case for the technology is being built, and Cisco will continue to look at it as an "access agnostic" vendor. [Translation: As long as it sells routers, we don't care.]

  • We brought this issue of "hype" to Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT). "WiMax is absolutely not overhyped," Motorola SVP and GM Fred Wright told LRTV. In fact, Wright went so far as to trash-talk some of the so-called 3G efforts. "3G is going to be short-lived," he said. "Our models show that WiMax will be significantly more cost effective [than HSDPA]."

    Interesting. This left me scratching my head. So I wandered over to the Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. booth.

  • WiMax is fantastic, says Huawei. "We are the leading vendor in the WiMax industry," says Charlie Chen, SVP of marketing and product management. Huawei says it has come up with a unique product that combines CDMA and WiMax in the same base station. So they love them both!

Meanwhile, I will wait until the technology is actually deployed and I can use it before I formulate my own opinion.

— R. Scott Raynovich, Editor in Chief, Light Reading

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