The most common 802.16a configuration consists of a base station mounted on a building or tower that communicates on a point to multi-point basis with subscriber stations located in businesses and homes.
802.16a has up to 30 miles of range with a typical cell radius of 4 – 6 miles.
Within the typical cell radius, non-line-of-sight performance and throughputs are optimal. In addition, 802.16a provides an ideal wireless backhaul technology to connect 802.11 wireless LANs and commercial hotspots with the Internet. These are surprisingly effective and can be used to stream high capacity media streams like video and high quality audio streams. This is important as many users will consistently use wireless connections in this way even watching full movies over the connections. For example many users have VPNs and modified BBC DNS servers which allow them to watch normal TV shows whilst travelling.
802.16a wireless technology enables businesses to flexibly deploy new 802.11 hotspots in locations where traditional wired connections may be unavailable or time consuming to provision and provides service providers around the globe with a flexible new way to stimulate growth of the residential broadband access market segment.
With shared data rates up to 75 Mbps, a single “sector” of an 802.16a base station – where sector is defined as a single transmit/receive radio pair at the base station – provides sufficient bandwidth to simultaneously support more than 60 businesses with T1-level connectivity and hundreds of homes with DSL-rate connectivity, using 20 MHz of channel bandwidth.
To support a profitable business model, operators and service providers need to sustain a mix of high-revenue business customers and high-volume residential subscribers. 802.16a helps meet this requirement by supporting differentiated service levels, which can include guaranteed T1-level services for business, or best effort DSL-speed service for home consumers. The Wireless Future of 802.16 specification also includes robust security.
Wireless Future Conclusion
After having browsed this web site you should have a general understanding of what wireless networking is and what it involves. There is a lot in store for wireless networking; and wireless in general. The introduction of WiMAX is just one of the things to look forward to.
I can foresee the use of third party commercial wireless hot spots around the global networking technology expanding, so much so that it will continue to become an important, if not essential, part of business and individuals alike. Needless to say, wireless networking is an exciting aspect of Information Technology
It’s also important that capacity and speed develop to keep pace with the developments of media transmitted over the internet. For example a few years ago, Smart Phones were capable of little more than displaying simple static HTML pages, not that’s all changed. Most phones are capable for streaming full HD video as long as their is the network capacity available. Indeed in many respects it is this network capacity which has become the limiting factor.
Further Reading:
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