Wired

In another 10 years, Marty Cooper predicts, high-speed mobile internet connections will be so commonplace people will take them for granted. He’s convinced that a key technology behind such capability will be the wireless broadband standard known as WiMax.

Cooper is not alone. Fans of mobile WiMax — which is designed to provide broadband access over a radius of up to several miles — claim the technology will cover exponentially larger areas than today’s Wi-Fi networks and cost less to use than 3G mobile-phone services. Mobile WiMax’s main drawback is a big one: It’s not available.

Still, mobile WiMax made a leap from concept to reality in December, when the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers approved a standard for 802.16e, which adds mobility to previous standards designed mainly for fixed services. This week will also be a momentous one for the fledgling standard, with the WiMax Summit 2006 taking place in Paris.

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