Cisco rethinks 802.16
Having joined the WiMAX Forum recently, and made no secret of its desire to acquire an 802.16 specialist, Cisco is now having doubts. Its CTO Charles Giancarlo told the Next Generation Networks conference in Boston last week that his company has "not invested in WiMAX" beyond providing backbone infrastructure for potential WiMAX networks in future.
Giancarlo argued that DSL and cable are already in place, and it will be hard for WiMAX to penetrate their base, and that by the time WiMAX is mobile, 3G will be well established. "Why would anyone build two parallel [wireless broadband] networks?" he asked - ignoring the fact that many cellcos lack sufficient spectrum to deliver all the capacity their customers will require in future, particularly in the enterprise, and may seek to offload traffic to more efficient WiMAX or to build high throughput overlays for specific applications. This will be particularly attractive with the advent of multi-network base stations and devices.
The only application for which Giancarlo could see much hope was as a better basis than Wi-Fi for large capacity hotspots, such as those at airports, or for metro area hotzones.
