Looks like WiMAX technology is getting a lot of traction these days. TelegeoGraphy just came up with a report showing a great growth for WiMAX all over the world, especially in India.
— http://www.WiMAXED.com

In response to questions about VoIP service on XOHM, here is something pretty interesting.

If you have the XOHM Zyxel Max-206M2 modem, try the following URL for the embedded webserver:

http://192.168.100.1/rpSys.html

(The default when you point your browser at 192.168.100.1 is: http://192.168.100.1/rpSys1.html. I spend all of about 10 minutes folling around and found the more interesting config menus, so it isn’t like XOHM is hiding this very hard.)

You will see a much more interesting set of configuration parameters, including SIP configuration for VoIP.

I don’t have a SIP account yet, since my VoIP provider is ATT Callvantage and I have an old MGCP VoIP router, but would be interested in hearing whether someone that does have SIP and this device can use it for VoIP phone service right out of the box.

AllanCJ, He was making the point that the ‘technology’ is available now, that they’re not waiting for more development, standards agreement, etc.

Regarding thru-put and capacity, Kevin and I were asking the questions. They also said they’d increase capacity if demand warrants it.

As someone in the DC area, soon to get coverage, I’m thinking I should give it a try. For blogging purposes.

Looking at the photo at the head of this article, I see that the box labelled ‘Available now’ is ticked. That seeems to be stretching the interpretation of ‘available’. It’s not available in the sense that 3G is available, where (I imagine) pretty much every city and suburb has it.

Over the last few years some extraordinary claims have been circulating about Wimax. I’m not surprised that the reality looks OK, but not amazing. Its use of spectrum isn’t hugely more efficient than EDGE’s, it just uses more spectrum.

A 15 Mbps throughput could be experienced in different was by users. If users are doing bursty things like e-mail and surfing, where there are long periods of little traffic and then a flurry of uplink and downlink traffic, they might enjoy a high data rate for those short intervals. On the other hand, if several users are running a real-time video conference, then no one is going to get a sizzling performance.

So I guess the concerns about WiMAX not working, period, that popped up last week were… premature?

Travis, I think that’s something we all want to know (and even asked) but didn’t get concrete answers. The closest I heard to an answer was either disturbing or simply bad due to my lack of understanding it. We heard that each tower could wirelessly handle 15 Mbps throughput. That doesn’t make sense to me because I’d interpret it as 15 people on that tower would each see around 1 Mbps bandwidth, which is nothing to write home about when compared to today’s 3G options. Once we see enough people using the network we’ll get a much better idea of course.

Inquiring minds want to know. What will throughput be like when lots of people are using the network?