WiMax seen growing fast globally

By Steven Scheer

SDEROT, Israel (Reuters) - An emerging long-range, high-speed wireless technology is expected to spread quickly and be available globally within two years, a key backer of the so-called WiMax technology said on Tuesday.

"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.

WiMax, which is expected to bring in higher revenues to the telecoms sector, allows for high-speed Internet connections in the tens of megabits per second -- far faster than the very popular WiFi, which users connect to networks over short distances.

"It will enable the same type of (broadband Internet) on the road as you have at home," said Gaby Waisman, general manager of Europe for Alvarion, an Israeli maker of WiMax modems and equipment.

WiMax can cover a stretch of as much as tens of kilometers, depending on the number of users. In New York City, for example, many base stations will be required around the city to meet the heavy demand, while a sparsely populated region will need fewer, Eldar noted.

He said that in addition to the United States, mobile WiMax is close to being rolled out in some European and Asia-Pacific countries including Russia and Japan.