How WiMAX Works

the best writer on the staff. Jonathan Strickland darn tuton. I hoped you wouldn't notice anyway. Today we are going to talk about wireless connectivity. Yes, uh, specifically, we're looking at WiFi and y max terms you've probably heard, maybe you're a little familiar with them, but they can be a little confusing. UM and WiFi has been in the news recently because there were there were a lot of cities that planned on rolling out municipal WiFi networks for citizens.

Now a lot of them have them for for emergency services, but several cities were planning on having these available for for anyone to use. UM basically any time you would be walking around town with your computer. Maybe you're on a business trip, for example, and you stop to UH to grab some lunch, sit out on a park bench. You could open up your laptop and check your email. You know it's you know, while you're out on the on the on the go. You don't have to be

at an office or at a coffee shop. You would basically be on the street able to to connect with your smartphone or your laptop computer. It seems like could be a great idea. Unfortunately, one by one these cities have been kind of abandoning these plans um and recently this is from the Orange County Register UH the Orange County in California, not the one in Florida. UH. Anaheim. The Anaheim City Council voted on July twenty nine to

stop their program with earth Link. Earth Link was one of the major providers for these kind of municipal WiFi initiatives and and like I said, they've all been kind of crumbling over the last year and a half or so. UM. This was one of the last larger cities to to try and implement municipal WiFi to to fold. So it's kind of um, A lot of people are kind of thinking of this as as the death knell for municipal WiFi. Now, now we should go ahead and say that WiFi in

general is not in danger. We're talking about trying to create a citywide network of WiFi. UM. So it looks like those it looks like people were rushing into these plans without really thinking them out all the way through and specifically thinking about how do they make enough money to support the plan and make a profit. Yeah. See, a lot of these these networks that they had set up basically had sort of if you will, two tiers pricing.

One would be free. You know, anybody could do that, but a lot of a lot of the networks that offered a free option. Uh, the connectivity was sort of iffy. Uh from the reports I've read, it was slow, um. And you could upgrade, you could pay to have access to this this network like you would at a coffee shop or a bookstore, um, you know, hotel, someplace where you had to have something to get you in the door of the network if you will. Um. But you know,

people weren't necessarily signing up for that. And if you think about it, if you if you have a wireless network at home, UM, you know, these these UH routers don't really have a lot of range, so you've got to if you're putting together a network like this, you've got to get a lot of routers to cover all this territory. You've got to get a lot of wiring for your wireless routers to connect them to the to

the you know, the actual internet, UH. And you have to have people running around making sure that you know, when they're blackouts and individual routers, somebody's gotta go fix it or repair the connection, or update the software and firmware. So you know, these once you have it up, it's not you know, one little node, you're covering an entire city block. You know that we're talking a lot of equipment. You don't just want the switch and and and have

it all work out just fine. Um Anaheim's approach was to connect routers to things like UM city lights and traffic signal polls, which was kind of interesting, you know, using existing UH infrastructure to support this. UM still didn't work, unfortunately. UH So some people are saying, maybe this is a sign that we should just wait for a broader acceptance of the Wi max UH format of wireless connectivity. I guess we should probably talk a little bit about the

differences between WiFi and WiMAX. First of all, we'll just get down to the very nitty gritty WiFi UH as defined by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the I triple E or I yes, thank you very much, and my my cajun friends thank you too. That's designated as the eight O two dot eleven UH standard. There are a series of standards there, Yeah, there are variations.

The original were eight O two dot eleven A and B, and there was a G which is faster and which is the latest, And it's really more of a proposal then firmly accepted standard, but it's got more, you know, each with each standard they're increasing the range and the reliability and the speed and the speed for the network.

So you know, it's it's pretty robust to have a series of standards like that, right and there in case you're wondering why they skipped over certain letters, those letters also are are part of the standards, but they deal with very specific instances like like roving WiFi, like when you when you move from one WiFi system to another, how can you seamlessly make that transition so that the user is not effect not affected when he or she

moves out of one network and into another. But the ones that Chris mentioned are the specific standards that relate to data transmission. UM Now, it's unlicensed, which means which in this case means that, uh, when you try and access a WiFi network, you're essentially battling it out with everyone else who's also trying to access that network, and this can affect your connection. It can make it go slower. I can mean that you could have an unreliable connection.

You could get booted off if too many people are trying to get into that connection at the same time. UM. So, think of it like a big building that only has one doorway and everyone is trying to go in and out of that one doorway at the same time. Y Max, on the other hand, is like a big building with lots of doorways, and they only allow the number of people to access the building the same numbers as there

are doors. So once you get to a point, like if they're forty doors in this building, that means forty people can access it going in and out of their individual doorways. But if the forty one person comes in they'll say, I'm sorry, you need to go to another building. Because the y max is a licensed UH standard as opposed to Wi Fi UM, and y MAX is also governed by the I E UH. It's at two dot sixteen,

so it's uh. It can be a little confusing when you're talking about all these at two's right, that's true. That's true. Okay, So there are actually a couple of ways that you can transmit y MAX signals, line of sight and non line of sight UM. Non line of

sight operates on the range of Wi Fi frequencies. Generally there's in a similar range two to eleven gigga hurts and you know, covers generally five square miles which is about sixty five square kilometers UM, which is you know, pretty healthy range, but not as much as the line of sight transmitters, and those actually require a dish antenna UM. I guess similar to what you might see for satellite television.

You know, it's an antenna that would go on the side of your house, and it actually does need to connect uh, not physically, but it needs to be able to if you will see the transmitter, and it can cover areas of up to hundred square miles or square kilometers, which is, you know, quite a range. But the benefit of having the line of sight is it can use a higher frequency and in that higher frequency there's more room for for information you know, bandwidth, more bandwidth, and

it gives you a more robust connection. UM, so you'd have fewer interruptions. We're talking a lot more bandwidth. UM. You know, you could say that it's an option that would really give some of the fiber optic connections to run for their money too. In fact, that's that's one of the main UH purposes for the y max technology.

It's not necessarily to replace WiFi and and a lot of people kind of confused WiFi and y max, thinking that that y max is really the common phrases WiFi on steroids and that's not true, um, because they're they're very different standards. UM. But y max one of the purposes for it is to be that last mile It's that's what's called in the industry, in the in the s P industry, Internet service provider for you guys out there, UM, it's to provide the connection to from the last mile

of the backbone UH to the customer. So that's why you would think of it as a replacement for for cable or for fiber optics, and uh, just to kind of compare it to Wi fi, WiFi in general reaches around a hundred and fifty feet indoors three feet in outdoors. That's not very far at all really in comparison. So one of the benefits of y max is that you don't need as many devices to cover a large area. You can use a few radio towers to transmit the signal and you'll be able to cover the same amount

of area that you would. You would also required like like a hundred or two hundred devices for a WiFi version of that same network. UM. I should also point out, you know, you mentioned the distance of the the line of sight and the nonline of sight. Um some people can test that the non line of sight the ones where you don't need to have an antenna pointed at

the transmitter. Some argue that in the field it gets down to maybe four to eight miles as opposed to but um, whether there or not, that's an instrumountable obstacle. It remains to be seen. And also, I mean that's just one side. It may be that they were using faulty technology just to test it. But either way, it still transmitting a signal much further than WiFi is capable

of doing. So, Um, there's that now. The the other issue with y max is that there's no real infrastructure for y max uh, and that would cost a lot of money to build up that infra infrastructure, which is one reason why a lot of companies we're looking at

WiFi instead, because in general WiFi is cheap. Yeah, and then just run down to your corner electronics store and pick up a couple of routers that stoually cover it, right Yeah, yeah, well maybe a little more than that, but it's still like, it's still readily available and it's uh, and it's easier to to use something that you know, everyone's got a version of it out already. I mean there's so many like laptops. Now, if you buy a laptop, nine times of tenant's going to have a WiFi adapter

already built into it. Um to to change over to y max would mean, because these are not using the same signals, it would mean you would have to build in. You would either have to have a lot of y max adapters available or you would have to build them in to the devices themselves. So you're talking about a massive change across multiple industries. So that's why it's not going to be a rapid adoption. I think, yeah, it actually has been. Uh, this is the first time you're

hearing about why why Max. You might think that this is a brand new thing that's been, you know, coming up in the last few months. It has actually been going on for many years now, um, and it I would imagine that that expense and working out the different kinds of technology than line of site and online of site and how they're gonna administer that. Um. I think that has a lot to do with why it hasn't

already shown up on everyone's doorstep. At this point, we all have things to think about, like say, what's the best site to buy a new leather jacket, whether to buy the three or six megapixel cameras. But thankfully we don't need to think about online fraud because for every purchase you make, Visa keeps an eye out for fraud with real time fraud monitoring and by making sure you're not liable for any unauthorized purchases. How's that for peace

of mind? Safe, secure, decent. So I guess we'll we'll We'll just have to wait and see whether or not someone comes up with a viable way of providing WiFi through uh a citywide network. Um, or if they'll just scrap that idea, go to y max instead and hope that the new format works, or of some other format comes out that we're not even talking about right now, that that takes over both and just surprises the heck out of both of us. UM. We'll probably have to

write an article on it. Yeah, I have. I have a good strong feeling that will be the case. But if you guys want to learn more about this, you can read how WiFi works or how y max works and how stuff works dot com right now, and we'll talk to you again soon. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you by the Reinvented two thousand twelve Camere. It's ready, are you