WiMax 2 Coming 2012 Promising 100 Mbps Download

The WiMax Forum might hopefully have the so-called WiMax 2 standard up and ready to go by the start of 2012. Even the LTE starts rolling out from major U.S. carriers in 2011. And believe me; 802.16m will be appreciably faster than its predecessor.

802.16m will also be backward compatible with 802.16e, the WiMax standard currently used by operators in the United States. This means that when U.S. ISP Clearwire upgrades to the new standard it will be able to do so at a relatively low cost and with minimal disruption.

Declan Byrne, the marketing director for the WiMax Forum industry group, says the WiMax 2 standard, formally known as 802.16m, will be finalized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) this November, with an eye toward certifying devices based on the standard throughout 2011. From there, he expects ISPs to start deploying the standard commercially throughout 2012, when U.S. carriers such as AT&T and T-Mobile will just be starting to offer LTE services nationwide.

WiMAX Forum Vice President Mohammad Shakouri has said that the objective for the new WiMAX standard is to deliver average downlink speeds of more than 100Mbps to users. In contrast, Sprint’s initial Xohm WiMax offering, this debuted commercially in 2008, delivered downlink speeds ranging between 3.7M to 5Mbps. But while 802.16m will give WiMax a major speed boost, don’t expect it to proliferate any further than the current WiMax technology that covers around 31 square miles per access point.

Both WiMax and LTE are hitting the market during a time when Cisco projects that mobile Internet traffic will double every year between now and 2013, when it will total an average of 2.2 million terabytes per month. Cisco predicts that the biggest driver for the traffic increase will come from video, which will account for roughly 64% of all mobile data traffic in 2013.

[via techwhack, engadget]