Paul Kapustka's Blog

Since I'm a WiMax wannabe (truly, I do think the technology has a great chance to enable the so-called third pipe of broadband access in this country) I looked hard for evidence of forthcoming wares, but the best I could find last week at IDF in San Francisco was an early days prototype, which does not look at all consumer-friendly unless we are all supposed to go back to the days of alligator clamps for connectivity.

Old-school!

Looking on the Intel Web site, I didn't find any solid shipping-date information, but I did find a recent presentation that seems to confirm that the cards are coming -- sometime -- and for added street cred, the presentation (as of Sunday night, anyway) still had a bunch of suggested fixes and changes left in. Hey, who's got time to proofreed, anyway? This iz the webb! (Besides, who knows if it's a sentence fragment, or poetic license?)

On the cool side of the ledger, Intel did say that it was coming out with chipsets for service provider gear-builders that would be software-switchable from fixed to mobile WiMax, allowing said providers to start building gear sooner for fixed networks that would be future-proofed for mobile WiMax. That alone may juice the market for WiMax even more than throwing more cash at Craig McCaw.

And Intel also said that it would work with Nokia to embed biggerbetterfaster Wi-Fi into its chipsets, which means we can all poach off our neighbors' Linksys routers much easier in the future.

But where's my WiMax card? The best I could find from last week was this report, which rehashes old news -- that there would eventually be a combined WiMax/Wi-Fi radio inside your laptop. Sure. But where's the card I can start using this Fall?