Clearwire may test 120Mbps WiMAX 2 next year
updated 04:40 pm EST, Tue January 19, 2010
Clearwire says not testing WiMAX 2 until 2011
Clearwire may begin testing hardware that enables even faster mobile broadband technology, thus far simply dubbed WiMAX 2, as early as 2011, according to the data provider's CTO. The 802.16m specification should be approved this summer by the IEEE and is expected to bring with it 120Mbps download and 60Mbps upload speeds in urban environments using 4x2 MIMO antennas. These numbers are about twice of what lab tests show for current WiMAX tech.
Clearwire CTO John Saw nonetheless warned last week that the company isn't making testing of the technology a top priority. He goes on to say 2012 is a possibility for a commercial launch of the service. Meanwhile, Russian provider Yota has plans to test 802.16m late this year, along with hardware partner Samsung.
Apart from the higher speeds, a key benefit of WiMAX 2 would be the more spectrally efficient 20MHz channels instead of the current 10MHz channels. [via Unstrung]
