Clearspot WiMax, Not Acne Medication
Photo compliments of Gizmodo.comJust today, Clearwire unveiled their latest breakthrough in 4G wireless communication technology, a portable WiMax-to-Wi-Fi hotspot. To most people, a WiMax-to-Wi-Fi hotspot sounds like a lot of Wi, and for good reason, it is. The Wi prefix simply stands for wireless, and why you should care, is because now with the help of Clearwire’s portable hotspot you too, can have your own personal mobile broadband wireless network.
Lets say you go to your lake house for the summer with some friends and co-workers. As expected there’s a couple of laptops along for the ride for business work or casual use and everyone needs to access the internet for some reason or another. With this new portable WiMax-to-Wi-Fi hotspot, you’d be able to simply turn on and within seconds, have a secure hi-speed wireless network capable of handling up to 8 computers. Once plugged in, the hotspot broadcasts its WiMax based network wirelessly with a standard Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) SSID, but once logged on you have to enter a password to gain clearance to the network. So no worries about nearby cheapskates hopping on the free internet bandwagon.
Now as far as speeds are concerned, the WiMax Clear Spot is no slouch. In early testing, when connecting to the hotspot network speeds ranged between 3Mbps and 7Mbps. For all intents and purposes, with speeds like those, you’ll have no problem streaming most online video, browsing the web, and even multiplayer gaming. Despite that, Clearwire has stated they intend on releasing most data plans with a 4Mbps cap, which still would be a happy medium for most users. Having said that there is one “hardware” limit per se. In testing when connecting directly to a WiMax network in Baltimore speeds were around 7Mbps, then when connecting through the hotspot’s Wi-Fi, speeds pushed 3-4Mbps. This result is not because of signal imbalance, but a cap on the actual device itself that throttles bandwidth that is over 5Mbps.
Now it’s not all cake and pony-rides in the land of Clearwire’s hotspot. It does have a few downfalls, but nothing really worth writing home about. To name a few: there’s no ethernet port making it less viable for home broadband replacement, the actual device has no way of displaying the strength of the WiMax signal that is currently available, and sometimes the device has difficulties accurately picking up a signal in low coverage areas.
Personally, I think Clearwire’s Hot Spot is a brilliant fusion of both Wi-Fi and WiMax. In short, it gives you the option of being able to have your cake and eat it too. I’d love for nothing more to go to a Starbucks and have the ability to set up my own personal network. Not just because I could, but because it’d allow me to avoid paying a one time fee to give me Wi-Fi during my visit. All in all, the Clear Spot is probably something I could live without. Yet, if I had the money I’d get it simply for those “Look what I can do” moments, so until I can come up with a real reason (and funding) as to why I need to make a mobile wireless network, it’ll remain on my want list.
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