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Pakistan Plans Mobile WiMax Network Rollout 165

Posted by Zonk from the getting-the-country-online dept.
OneInEveryCrowd writes "Pakistan is apparently ready to move ahead of the USA in the deployment of a mobile wireless network." From the article: "The deployment is a milestone in the spread of WiMax, a superfast wireless technology that has a range of up to 30 miles and can deliver broadband at a theoretical maximum of 75 megabits per second. The 802.16-2004 standard, which is used in fixed WiMax networks, is being skipped in favor of a large-scale introduction of 802.16e, which was only recently agreed upon by the WiMax Forum. 'We made the decision 18 months ago to jump over (802.16-2004) and go straight to 802.16e,' Paul Sergeant, Motorola's marketing director for Motowi4, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. 'We've been working on it for a while, which is how we're able to ship so soon after agreement.'"
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Pakistan Plans Mobile WiMax Network Rollout More

Pakistan Plans Mobile WiMax Network Rollout

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  • I don't know how USA is reacting to this but i'm sure they want to be bigger and badder. Good job pakistan :P
    • I predict as the world develops more, the US will shrink rapidly in technological power. As an American, I hate seeing this happen (although I'm not an obsessive brainwashed patriot that thinks the US is #1, I do have pride because it is my country). In the past, we have been a large driving force in bringing some truely great inventions into the mainstream, but It has been a while since we have done anything like that.... We aren't getting any smarter (we might actually be getting dumber some studies ha
      • Unfortunately, Britain's industry snoozed all through the ultra-Conservative Thatcher years and now has very little industry to speak of. Steel - all gone. Coal - all gone. Engineering - damn near all gone, even the mighty BAe Systems only has a tiny site on the Clyde these days. Computers - well, in Scotland we have a fairly healthy games industry in Dundee I suppose.

        It all went wrong on the Conservative's watch. The US might do well to learn from that.
    • Oh, we're long ahead where it "counts." How much money are Pakistani ISPs making off this? Less than (the) US! Seriously, without a way for the ISPs to make money, their lobbyists will never let these networks get beyond a city/community level.
    • Considering the size difference between the two countries alone, the fact that these countries are leaving the U.S. in the dust in terms of wireless internet service is no surprise.

      And if you want to nitpick, Pakistan has a much more hostile terrain, a lack of already existing infrastructure and by doing this they kill two (or three) birds with one stone. (A cheap easy voice-over-IP telephone infrastructure, cheap easy wireless national internet service and arguably a relatively cheap investment in the lon

  • With all this increased bandwith in Pakistab (Score:5, Funny)

    by nihilistcanada ( 698105 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @02:00PM (#15421062)
    Osama Bin Laden can finally now upgrade to higher quality video for his latest release.
    • No, I can exclusively reveal that from now on using the increased bandwith Bin Ladens rantings and ravings will be broadcast Bollywood style. Marketing advisors close to Bin Laden feel his message is too much doom and gloom and would achieve broader appeal if it was presented with some more singing and dancing.

  • The NSA is happy (Score:3, Funny)

    by Harmonious Botch ( 921977 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @02:03PM (#15421075) Homepage Journal
    30 miles? Now they don't even need a presence on the ground, unless the antennas are very directional.

  • Ahead of the US? (Score:4, Informative)

    by damian cosmas ( 853143 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @02:05PM (#15421083)
    Hopefully this new wireless technology will help them crack the 50% literacy [odci.gov] milestone. I'm sure the 4% of the population with internet access [odci.gov] will really appreaciate it, though.
    • Its only for the rich, like most technology that Bill Gates always spounts hot air about technology revolutionising people's lives like them. No, its for the rich mostly. They even have to share mobile phones between communities in some areas, granted its at least better than nothing but its not enough.

    • Re:Ahead of the US? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by wenchmagnet ( 745079 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @02:23PM (#15421153)
      There are many challenges Pakistan faces, but this is progress... cheap wireless broadband access for the masses is GREAT! Whatever your preconcieved notions about Pakistan, the literacy rate in the urban areas is quite high and a LOT of people will benefit from this.

      It also helps in getting the literacy rate up as more people take an interest in becoming literate. You might not believe it but many rural communities can limp along quite well without any need for widespread literacy - this will change that by showing them a bigger wider world that is out there for them to explore once they start to read!

      Broadband internet access means access to a multitude of different views which means its a counter against fundamentalism and brainwashing.

      As a Pakistani, I am very excited about this!
    • I work in Pakistan for a US company.

      So I am really getting a kick out of most of these replies.

      Some of you guys are very good at making it sound like you know what you are talking about.

      But trust me.... You don't.

      I think you just want to make yourself sound smart, when in reality you dont know what you are talking about.

      This is how bad info gets passed around.

      If you dont know about the topic....Dont make yourself sound like you do.

      Cuz some /.'ers believe anything they hear.
    • Hopefully this new wireless technology will help them crack the 50% literacy milestone.

      Well, I'm functionally illiterate and I'm perfectly capable of using the internet (atleast, I think I'm functionally illitereate. Yesterday f.x. I visited this cool site [myspace.com] and couldn't understand a word of what people wrote in their user profiles.. even so, I could still enjoy the pictures and vidoes of fat chicks showing body parts I really didn't want to see! yay me!).

      I'm sure the 4% of the population with internet ac

    • Right, once they get power to the many area in Pakistan that have no electricity they may have wireless access.

    • Re:Ahead of the US? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mapkinase ( 958129 )

      Let me rephrase beyond "Informative" tag in two words what the parent said: "Pakistan is a developing country". Duh!

      Scenario: /.er reads the only positive article in the history of Slashdot about subject country, digs out two negative facts about subject country, gets 5 mod points Informative from a moderator who counts number of references and % signs iin the post to base the moderation upon.

      The big mistake of the original poster was to compare to US. God forbids to do it ever!

      It is funny how citizens (res
    • Very useful this connection will be since Pakistan implements a 700ms latency to all Internet connections so Paktel maintains a telecom monopoly. Thats the reason why you dont find gamers from Pakistan online.

      Not to mention many things in IT have been promised since 1997, none properly implemented, if at all. As a Pakistani I'm HIGHLY skeptical.

      • Very useful this connection will be since Pakistan implements a 700ms latency to all Internet connections so Paktel maintains a telecom monopoly.

        700ms latency? I don't know where you get your news. Try pinging lg.nexlinx.net.pk; that's a machine on the ISP side of my DSL ISP.

  • Just so I understand: (Score:5, Funny)

    by DysenteryInTheRanks ( 902824 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @02:06PM (#15421088) Homepage
    I want to make sure I understand this correctly: Osama bin Laden is about to get faster broadband Internet on his laptop in some mud hut in Pakistan than I could possibly buy at home in the U.S.?

    p0wn3d, man. Fucking p0wn3d.

  • I don't know how well it's going to work. For a coverage range of 30 miles, at theortical maximum of 75 Mbps, that's not much per user. Sometimes my cable connection could get slow in my house, with my other roomates using it, and thats an 8 Mbps connection, wired. Also, does a 30 mile range maximum mean in each direction, so a sphere of radius 30 miles? God I would hate to be on that.
    • There is no reason to think that a government body, or quasi-government body like most public utiltiies couldn't set up a good network.

      A lot of it is in hiring the right people. Right now there are large nubmers of very skilled people that are unemployed or underemployed. These people could be snapped up at a good price.

      Also, as many developing countries have learned, it's cheaper to invest in modern technology than to maintain and upgrade older networks. A wireless network that uses off-the-shelf modern

    • 30 mi. is the maximum radius, nothing prevents the use of smaller cells in build up areas.

    • For a coverage range of 30 miles (You)

      has a range of up to 30 miles (TFA)

      Reality: There are PTP applications that can hit 30 miles. Users will never be on a point to point link as it would take one AP per subscriber. For mobile applications, you are looking at a range of about two miles with six access points creating a 360 degree cluster. Assuming we get half of the theoretical 75 megabits per second, we have ~35 Mb/s per AP and 225 Mb/s per cluster.

      Sometimes my cable connection could get slow in my hou

  • -1 redundant... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Duncan3 ( 10537 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @02:07PM (#15421093) Homepage
    "ready to move ahead of the USA"

    We get it already, 30% of high school kids drop out, our President has an IQ of 60, and smart kids are beaten in the streets, what the hell do you expect?

    • ... our President has an IQ of 60 ...
      The article linked http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bliq-bush.ht m [about.com] claims Lovenstein Institute research (which is not to say that said research or the reference isn't biased) estimates Jr's IQ to be 91. For comparison O'Reagan's IQ was estimated to be 105 and FDR was 147.

    • Re:-1 redundant... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by suv4x4 ( 956391 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @02:44PM (#15421218)
      We get it already, 30% of high school kids drop out, our President has an IQ of 60, and smart kids are beaten in the streets, what the hell do you expect?

      War with Iran by the end of the year. Was this the right answer?

      (what do I win btw?)
      • (what do I win btw?)

        The undying enmity of half the population of the planet?

      • Sure, funded by VISA and AMEX I guess?

        Or, perhaps they intend to start a draft in a country where 30% of the electorate are demanding the President's impeachment.

        Nope. The only reason Iran has even grown such big balls in the first place is because they understand our quagmire, even if some Americans don't.

        Reagan Republicans UNITE! Let's get our party back under control.

        As the Gipper said: Government is not the solution to our problem- Government *is* the problem.

    • I think this has much more to do with the fact that 2nd and 3rd world countries never had telephone infrastructure to begin with, so it would make sense that they just skip it and go right to wireless technologies. And as long as you're going to a wireless technology, might as well make it the cutting edge one.
      • I think this has much more to do with the fact that 2nd and 3rd world countries never had telephone infrastructure to begin with

        "Second World" countries would be those allied with the USSR during the Cold War.

        "Third World" countries historically was everyone that wasn't allied with either the US or the USSR during the Cold War, but has, in the media, come to mean "undeveloped country."
      • You are spot on with your observation.
        I do and have done a lot of biz in 2nd & 3rd world countries. With the fall of the Soviet Union the newly independant countries went for the latest tect in a big way. Those were the days. I had to get a Supercomputer export license to hand carry an Alpha to Kazakhstan.
        Their lack of POTS for the majority of the population enables the take rapid up of Mobile phones. After all, who would ewait months to get a land line installed when you could get a mobile in minutes.

        F
      • A friend who worked in Pakistan said that they had numerous problems with telephone and data line outages. Some of the more enterprising local residents would steal the cable right off the poles.
  • It was bad enough when South Korea got DSL lines ten times faster than our cable modems, but now this is just embarassing.
    • Its even more embarassing that New York, the center of the worlds finance has alot of very poor people without. I say SHAME ON YOU. The distrubition of wealth there is pathetic.
    • Wireless rollout has been pretty bad in USA and even basic services like cellular phone are not available in many ruralareas. A comparison like this could finally get some attention from the "leadership".

      Of course the opposite could also happen: the Administration could equally spin this up that wireless networking == antiChrist == terrorism.

  • Though I do honestly hope WiMax succeeds, there's absolutely no gaurantee that they will be able to get the consumers to buy these things like hotcakes. Quite franky 802.11b at 11MBit/s is good enough to carry (US anyways) consumer broadband which averages around 1.5Mbit down 384kbit up. Until broadband reaches the speeds where a consumers WiFi link is what's slowing them down, that's when we'll get the upgrades. But in the meantime, unless people suddenly have a real use for the increased speed/distance, I
    • There's no such thing as "too much bandwidth".
    • There may be no urge for an increase in speed for now, but distance is a big gain for most people. I don't know what it's like elsewhere, I don't get around too much, but at these ranges you can have access practically anywhere.

    • Re:Consumer adoption (Score:2, Insightful)

      by zogger ( 617870 )
      It's the distance, man. WAY too many places in the US have no broadband at all with cable/wires/fiber and wifi is too short a range and trees and hills just muck it up.. WiMax is about the only way I'll get broadband, even then it will be iffy, and there are millions and millions more people in the same boat. the US is not just the top major urban areas afrter all and even a lot of suburban areas have little to no choice in broadband. If some companies get wimax out there, they WILL sell it. All these peopl
      • Darn right we will take it. I have been hounding verizon for years and have even twice entered ISDN orders only to have them cancelled. No way they will bring DSL in my lifetime. We have some Wifi offerings not too many miles away but the wiMax ought to doit.

        If Osama can have it why can't I? It is not just a little embarrasing to have nothing but POTS just a few miles away from a big metro area.
  • Really the technology for this was available to do this in cities with the 802.11b spec if the last mile net connections were actually neutral (which they are supposed to be in most cities).

    G seemed like a good spec, obviously it wasn't fast enough to run a corperate or even a power users connection off but if they could have hit the theoretical maximum it would have been fine, these new specs won't allow small deployments which can service many users so they aren't a huge improvement over local wireless
  • Now they can oppress women and demand total religious cultism without those pesky wires!

  • Not just for the Internet (Score:3, Informative)

    by cam762 ( 948285 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @02:46PM (#15421226)
    WiMAX 802.16e isn't used just for Internet connectivity, but also competes against cellular technologies (GSM/UMTS and CDMA2000) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wimax#Similar_technol ogies [wikipedia.org]

    While 802.16e is mainly a mobile technology, it also supports "Fixed" access and mesh networking, which means that signals can be relayed from one access point to another instead of needing to hardwire every connection.

    This should help implementation and penetration of the region by reducing the overall amount of infrastructure required.

    • It might bring in more competition to the mobile service provider market aswell. If you consider that the german government managed to make 50 billion Euros selling the spectrum for UMTS, you can imagine what kind of fair competition and pricing there is.

      "Old" Wi-Fi is in a sense competition for cellular technologies when those new "hybrid-phones" come out, that switch to WiFi access points when they find them.
  • Alcatel is teaming up with the Government of India to set up a WiMax development center [techworld.com] in the South Indian city of Chennai and the products developed there will be marketed worldwide. It appears that parts of Asia prefer to rollout wireless data networks as opposed to wireline ones, probably due to the fact that it is easier to deploy wireless networks. With Europe going ahead with the adoption of UMTS and HSDPA, it looks like wireless data networks are going to become pretty ubiquitous in many parts of
  • A US based company in Pakistan is using WiMax for its call center. Sales Rep will be sitting at home working with WiMax and will be monitored by a webcam (I know it sounds lousy and 1984ish, hope it works). This will introduce a whole new way for outsourced companies to work here.

  • AT&T did its bit to puncture the WiMAX hype today, while providing an update on three of its trial WiMAX deployments. Behzed Nadji, AT&T's Chief Architect, debunked stories about 70 Mbit/s throughput over distances of 70 miles for WiMAX. "There's little reality to that," he said. A range of 3 to 5 miles and 2 Mbit/s was closer to reality. In fact, one of AT&T's three deployments rarely saw throughput rise above 500 kbit/s, he said. Source [theregister.co.uk]

    I can already provide point-to-multipoint 360 coverage

  • Evidently, a pious Islamofascist can only go so long without broadband pr0n.

  • All five Pakistani internet users are joyous (Score:3, Funny)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Sunday May 28, 2006 @05:55PM (#15421921) Homepage
    All five Pakistani internet users are joyous.
  • There are a bunch of low-cost no-name recruiting agencies searching around for engineers to go to Pakistan for a WiMax project the last month or two. It doesn't hold too well for the project that they are trying to pay Paki prices, but expect to find experienced first world engineers.

    I had a twisted conversation with one of them two weeks ago. They want all the usual impossibilities, such as 5-10 years of WiMax experience, 15-30 years industry experience but only 18-25 years old, have to be able to program
  • The government is expanding internet access in an attempt to maintain Pakistan's top rank amongst nations that search Google for "sex".

    http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex&ctab=1&sa=N [google.com]
    • First off in all the searches Pakistan's bar was way bigger than the one in second place, and I find it quite unusual for that to be the case. In all my years living here I've never noticed any unnatural tendencies of anybody towards the sexual habits of an animal of any type. Then Secondly, in these lewd term's results, if you go into the languages tab, it shows Arabic. Now, logically speaking, if the country on top was Pakistan, then surely the language on top should be English. I don't think too ma
  • I spent much time in Pakistan (over 3 years) and I have had first hand experience with the limited growth of the internet in rural Pakistan. Outside of the mega cities of Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpinidi(twin city Islamabad), rural areas had very limited access to the internet via 56k modem based internet.

    During my last visit (last may) I witnessed a massive surge in cell phone use and purchases by the middle class and dare I say lower income brackets (very parallel to us in Canada and America). Access to in
  • More development of wireless access in developing nations seems expected. These nations don't have the resources to make everything landline and so they spend the money trying to improve their network prevalence through wireless methods.

    I'm not just making this stuff out of my rear-end. Look at the land-line phone vs cellular phone use in the United States [cia.gov] vs. a developing country like India [cia.gov] or Pakistan [cia.gov]. Cell phone use in developing countries is more prevalent than land-line phones. Why should we expect

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