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Here at Ars, we have an ever-expanding bulletin board of really cool concepts that always seem to be 3 to 5 years away. Falling into this category are such Star Trek-grade ideas as large screen OLEDs, the paperless office, capacitor batteries, and Duke Nukem Forever.
Alas, one of our most cherished bulletin board Post-Its looks to be hovering perilously over the recycling bin, as Intel finally gears up for its mighty WiMAX push. The company has stated that it is shipping its Rosedale 2 WiMAX chipset to strategic partners for testing, and this time they really mean it.
It seems like it was only a couple of years ago that the chip giant began shipping an earlier version of its WiMAX chipset to strategic partners, and a quick dip into the Ars Archives confirms that time frame. At the time, it was predicted that 2005 would herald the widespread deployment of WiMAX, and by 2006 we would likely have converted much of the nation's "last mile" copper cable into the next generation of pennies.
Unfortunately, that still hasn't happened. While a few ISPs have bided their time by providing devices built upon a non-standard version of WiMAX, widespread adoption of the technology has been delayed by a continual series of issues, including revisions of the specification and battles over spectrum allocation.
Alas, one of our most cherished bulletin board Post-Its looks to be hovering perilously over the recycling bin, as Intel finally gears up for its mighty WiMAX push. The company has stated that it is shipping its Rosedale 2 WiMAX chipset to strategic partners for testing, and this time they really mean it.
It seems like it was only a couple of years ago that the chip giant began shipping an earlier version of its WiMAX chipset to strategic partners, and a quick dip into the Ars Archives confirms that time frame. At the time, it was predicted that 2005 would herald the widespread deployment of WiMAX, and by 2006 we would likely have converted much of the nation's "last mile" copper cable into the next generation of pennies.
Unfortunately, that still hasn't happened. While a few ISPs have bided their time by providing devices built upon a non-standard version of WiMAX, widespread adoption of the technology has been delayed by a continual series of issues, including revisions of the specification and battles over spectrum allocation.