Will WiMAX Make It?

A new insight from ABI indicates that the big wireless modem players are starting to offer WiMAX products for the portable standard. It still may take internal modems for WiMAX to really take off, but this should be seen as a positive step.

I'm STILL VERY skeptical of a WiMAX windfall, and it has been a VERY LONG TIME COMING, but from these recent updates, it looks like there is a home for this standard.

Yet Another MicroTransceiver

According to EE Times, Silicon Labs has recently joined the fray in the battle for "ubiquitous sensoring".


You can't control what you can't measure, and from the looks of it, we want to control EVERYTHING! The trick is to do so without power or wires, so the push is to develop very low power microcontrollers with RF "peripherals".

The other piece of this puzzle is also yet unsolved and, IMHO, will be extremely fractious: the protocol. Every application requires a different latency, datarate, accuracy, distance, network topology, etc... and so there is not a "one size fits all" solution. Each application (or group of apps) will have to have its own optimized solution so that power can be scavenged and system requirements can be met.

Sorry Zigbee, Bluetooth LE, etc.... Your efforts to be the be-all, end-all solution will be the very thing that limits, if not obliterates, your market share.

"Welcome to the party, SiLabs!"