Manchester leads Wimax rollout

Pipex Wireless is to launch its first commercial rollout of Wimax wireless data services in Manchester under a new company name, Freedom4.

The service, which follows pilots in Milton Keynes and Warwick, will be the start of a countrywide rollout across 50 cities, chief executive Mike Read said.

Wimax can offer data rates in excess of 10Mbit/sec in either direction, in contrast to fixed-line links on which the uplink usually offers a fraction of the speed of the downlink.

Read pointed out that many companies, and people swapping picture and video online, need to upload data as much as to download it. He said: "Symmetrical DSL links have not taken off to date because they have been too expensive."

He was short of details of schedules and cost, other than to say that pricing will be competitive and that London will be late on the launch road map because of the number of high buildings and the need for a lot of base-station sites.

It also seems that users will be charged more for higher data rates, which goes against the trend in wired links. "But if you buy two meg you will get two meg," said Read, in a dig at the inflated claims of DSL and cable operators who because of distance or contention do not deliver their advertised speeds.

Freedom4, a joint venture between Pipex and Intel, owns 84MHz of spectrum between 3.6GHz and 3.7GHz. This is licensed only for fixed links though in practice there will be limited mobility. It is expected to get approval for mobile use some time over the next few months (for more on all this see blog Wimax nomads will skirt the law ).

Initially, the services will target small and medium-sized businesses requiring fixed symmetrical links. Wimax has also been seen as a good backup system for companies relying on a DSL or cable link.

Another potential market is among people who use only a mobile phone for personal calls and who do not want to pay for a DSL phone line.

But in the longer term, Wimax will compete with 3G links, and 3.5g ones such as HSDPA. Some observers refer to it as a 4G technology.

Intel will be putting both Wifi and Wimax on notebook motherboards from next year.

And Nokia plans to put the technology into handsets, starting with the next version of its N800 web tablet, according to Markku Holmstrom, head of the company's broadband wireless product management, who was at the Freedom4 launch.

The Wimax rollout could be good news for people who currently cannot get a good fixed-broadband link.

Freedom4 chief operating officer Brendan O'Rourke said services would spread out from cities wherever there is a demand. But each hop into the countryside will need to be within wireless range (up to 10Km) of an operating base station to make it financially viable.