Unlicensed Spectrum To The Rescue
from the it's-everywhere dept
Business Week latest cover story is a report on the wonders of unlicensed spectrum for wireless technologies. They give a pretty good overview of the rise of unlicensed spectrum, and talk about the technologies trying to follow in WiFi’s footsteps: WiMax, Mobile-Fi, ZigBee and UWB. None of this will be new if you follow the space, but it should be useful for those trying to understand all these different wireless standards coming along. The article does mention the increasing battle with licensed spectrum and how cellular carriers hope to take on the wide-area technologies with their 3G offerings, though it doesn’t go into that much detail. Sidebars with the article include a discussion on more local area wireless technologies like WiFi and ZigBee allow for going well beyond just having a computer connect to a network, and more into true machine to machine communications, which may seem a lot less interesting to most people, but which could be the most powerful aspect of the next generation of wireless technologies. They also include an interview with Sean Moloney at Intel talking about how critical WiMax is to their business, which shouldn’t surprise anyone considering just how hard they’ve been pushing it. He takes the opportunity, as always, to criticize people who think 3G will be the wireless data solution of the future, ensuring that we’re going to have plenty of pointless 3G vs. WiMax stories over the next few months.
