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Of course, that 70Mbps figure at 30 miles is very much a theoretical one. It assumes that the base station is located at a high geographical point and that you’ve got the base station utterly to yourself. As more and more people start to also use that base station, you’d have to move a little bit closer and when the capacity was eventually full, you’d practically have to be touching it to get any speed at all. That’s the laws of physics for you. Of course in built-up metropolitan areas you’ll have to have a great many cells to make an effective network. Even so, the exciting thing is that effective bandwidth figures between 1Mpbs and as much as 5Mbps are being talked about. That means that we could all be enjoying speeds on our laptop that are as fast as entry-level fixed line broadband in the UK.

If the thought of this true wireless freedom has you jumping up and down with excitement then you’ll probably want to know when it’s all going to happen. Well don’t hold your breathe as it isn’t going to happen any time soon. Intel has announced the WiMAX is being trialled in many locations around the world but this is the fixed line version that has been ratified by the nice people at the IEEE organisation (a group that goes round ratifying things) with the name of 802.16.

Fixed WiMAX is essentially an alternative for situations where installing conventional broadband is not practical for whatever reason. Intel in Israel showed us a video of how it had been used to bring broadband to a Bedouin school essentially located in the middle of the desert. The fixed WiMAX mast provided Internet access and Wi-Fi was then used to disperse it round the school. Previously there was only dial-up and both teacher and pupils were suitably grateful to Intel, the great benefactor. Fantastic.

But this is only stage one of the roll out. Stage two will be concerned with indoor antennas for home use. This could be made portable, but only by transporting a small base station that will probably be larger than your laptop and plugging it into a wall.

It won’t be until stage three that things get interesting. This phase is actually defined by another standard – 802.16e. By this stage Intel intends for WiMAX PC Cards to be available or built into laptops or indeed into those Ultra-mobile PCs that it envisions, as Wi-Fi is now. Unfortunately for eager wireless beavers, 802.16e is a pretty new standard. In fact it was only ratified on December 7th 2005 - a couple of weeks ago. So in terms of actual products and infrastructure Intel is estimating late 2006 at the earliest.

Intel isn’t the only one pushing WiMAX and it’s just one of many companies that make up the WiMAX forum. Of course it’s pushing WiMAX hard as it has a lot to gain from the format’s success as it is the one developing the chips. However, Intel won’t necessarily have everything its own way. There are other competing technologies that also seek to give us broadband on the move.

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