FIRST WORD LANCE ULANOFF
WiMAX: Why You Want It Right Now
A
s the subway train I’m on races through the white, almost gleaming tunnels of Seoul, I can hardly believe what I’m seeing on the lightweight Samsung netbook that sits on my lap: high-definition YouTube video files streaming with nary a hiccup or pixilation. Is it a dream? No, it’s a reality—in South Korea. This demonstration came courtesy of Samsung and South Korea’s remarkable WiMAX-based WiBro network. I’ll be honest: Until now, I hadn’t paid much attention to WiMAX. I knew it was supposed to be faster than current 3G broadband speeds, but I also understood that it was rolling out very, very slowly (and “rolling” would be a generous term). To date, our mobile expert, Sascha Segan, has been able to test WiMAX only in Baltimore. There’s also a competing 4G option, LTE, which isn’t in any U.S. markets currently, but 4G may ultimately have better traction than WiMAX, because of greater carrier support. My response to all this confusion and lack of deployment
PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION NOVEMBER 2009
has been to ignore it until such technologies become a real option in the U.S. That was before my trip to South Korea. Raising Expectations I currently use two 3G options: AT&T’s HSDPA and Verizon’s EV-DO Rev A. They’re both okay, but I’m comfortable using them only for browsing simple Web sites, tweeting, checking e-mail, and downloading small files. These days, the networks feel like they’re choking from overuse. I figured this was probably as good as can be expected in the world of mobile broadband. I wrongly assumed that 4G would be like 3G albeit a bit faster, an incremental change that I really wouldn’t notice. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is a hilly, densely populated metropolis with over 22 million people. It already has a reputation for broadband innovation. Roughly 90 percent of its population has broadband access, most of it thanks to fiber to the home. According to Hung Song, Samsung’s VP of global marketing for telecommuni-
