In a year or two, we will see it in many metro zones and areas of heavy demand,” Dan Eldar, head of Intel’s design center in Israel where the WiMax technology was being developed, told Reuters. “It will take time to reach a massive deployment.”
Sprint Nextel, the number three U.S. wireless carrier, said on Tuesday it was soft-launching its Xohm mobile Internet service for employees in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington D.C. ahead of a commercial WiMax launch later in 2008 in select U.S. cities.
Sprint Nextel has said it will spend $5 billion by 2010 on a WiMax network using the new 802.16e standard. Smaller mobile carrier Clearwire is also planning a WiMax network.
The Sprint commitment to WiMax alone has helped create demand for more WiMax technology. WiMax technology is exploding onto the scene, and will bring with it a dizzying number of improvements to how people communicate.
