While everyone is talking about Wimax...

While everyone is talking about Wimax,Wifi seems to have quietly grown up.
I came across an interesting article in "the Ruckus room", Ruckus Wireles's corporate blog.
The blogpost give an insight on how WiFi has matured as a technology of choice in a market that we hear very little about. Service providers all over the globe (be in Internet service providers, Telco's or TV companies) are all looking at the tripple and quadruple play market. And seemingly they all have been looking at WiFi as a technology to distribute the service/signal around your home.
It maks sense; your ISP also wants to provide you with a phone service, IPTV, VOD etc.
Your phone company also wants more than a slice of the cake and your TV company most likely already has a cable into your house.
All they need is a way to distribute the signal around the house without the need for a rats-nest of cables and while allowing them to manage QoS and preferrably also allow them to manage the services in a transparent manner.

To quote from the post: "New technology is now letting operators not only integrate Wi-Fi but control things they haven't been able to control before. Things such as signal path selection, being able to see into the home RF spectrum, allocate different SSIDs for different services, prioritize traffic, monitor packet error rates, SNR, signal strength in different areas of the home. Blah, blah, blah."

It's interesting to see that a technology that grew from use in a LAN environment and that subsequently was adapted in long distance links and to cover large urban & rural areas has now gone full circle and is coming back into the home.

It also puts a different slant on the whole Wimax vs WiFi debate. While Wimax is full of great promises and is able to cover large distances and has a throughput that far exceeds WiFi, it is still best suited for backhaul applications. WiFi has been around much longer and has matured to such an extent that it has ensured it's place in the market for quite some time to come. Also looking at the millions of WiFi devices currently in use it would be lunacy to expect Wimax to capture this market....

E.