Wired on Friday: I'm writing this column into thin air. Several miles of thin air, in fact. My laptop is connected wirelessly to a small box in the corner of this Silicon Valley home, in the downtown of San Jose. From the box it passes to a square aerial on the side of our house. From there my house is connected to the internet by a few miles of wireless broadband. Not a wire or phone line in sight.
There are a lot of people around here betting that this is the future. They're not being too precise about why, or how. They have, however, given this opportunity a name: WiMax.
Internet service providers (ISPs) offering broadband internet access have largely fulfilled the needs of the low-hanging fruit in their markets: densely populated areas already close to telephone infrastructure.
Their appetite for growth is increasingly trained on what have been headaches for years - more rural areas or those where the existing infrastructure is not conducive to broadband (including much of the States).
ISPs around the world are interested in solving this prevalent problem with a bi-directional radio link, like mine, and they're looking for cheap standard to hang their hat on.
That is what's promised by WiMax: a high-speed, long-distance standard that could come to replace and complement DSL/T1 coverage in areas where managing copper has been a 30-year nightmare.
WiMax will make installations like mine easier and cheaper to roll out.
For ISPs it solves the 'last mile' problem: how to get that last mile or kilometre of internet from your service provider's internet connection to you. In WiMax's case, the 'last mile' can, theoretically, stretch to 30 last miles (although more practical-minded testers feel 10 is a more reasonable limit for the technology).
But long before WiMax reached consumers, the hype - and backlash - about this technology sloshed around a frenzied market.
WiMax has been said to be the defeater of 3G. Intel and other WiMax boosters predict that even laptops will become WiMax receivers, and transmitters will be as ubiquitous as mobile cell towers. Others, tired of waiting for the real standard, see the 'WiMax revolution', like so many technology revolutions, as just tech companies inventing themselves a new market.
In fact, perhaps WiMax has been over-hyped and shortchanged all at once. Will you be kicking up your phone's video link to a WiMax connection while bungee-jumping from a hot-air balloon by 2007? Probably not. The problems WiMax solves aren't glamorous. It may, however, fill some very profitable niches.
"[ WiMax] is very attractive to us for filling holes in our wired service," says the manager of Covad's pre-WiMax trials, Ron Marquardt. (Covad is one of the US's largest DSL providers, and the provider of my trial unit.) That doesn't just mean the black holes of DSL connectivity.
Marquardt also talks about serving nomadic customers: those whose work benefits from onsite internet, but involves temporary locations.
Business conferences looking to provide attendees with connections from a variety of venues are a small market, but very lucrative. Construction companies have clamoured for onsite access to the internet as well, but balked at signing the long contracts that make wiring their sites worth it for ISPs.
Uptake might not be limited to connecting to the internet. WiMax will interest companies providing intranets for campuses and longtime IT puzzles like oil exploration sites.
Linking remote sites within an organisation makes WiMax attractive to institutions compared to 3G. You pay a flat fee for data, rather than pay per bit; WiMax is faster than 3G, and, like WiFi local network transactions, you don't have to travel though a separate telecom company - one less point of insecurity.
WiMax is compared with 3G and WiFi, but perhaps a more instructive analogy is satellite TV. After all, it requires an aerial and it competes with bits of buried copper, very reminiscent of pay TV.
In the 1980s the task of putting a satellite dish on every house was daunting in any sector - and indeed it didn't happen all at once. Satellite television still doesn't have the ubiquity of, say, the phone service, and these days countries seem to fall one way or another: either cable- or satellite-driven, with a few in the middle seeing market penetration with both.
From where I'm sitting WiMax doesn't feel very different from my old DSL. And for clicking on webpages, and sending mail, it never will. That, of course, is the point. When the hype dies down, what Covad and other companies are hoping is that WiMax will become not ubiquitous, but invisible: just another tool in the connectivity toolbox.
