Carrying your notebook or PDA from home or your favorite café to your corporate office, deep in the bowels of your work place, is the equivalent of moving from a MAN or WAN to a LAN. The WiMAX MAN will serve you well enough outside the plant, but inside you fall within the security concerns and LAN structure of your company.

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To ensure broadband access inside or out, you could have two wireless modem cards, one for WiMAX and one for Wi-Fi. However, your notebook or PDA most likely has Wi-Fi built in, so only a separate WiMAX modem card would be needed. You can probably live with the mechanical changeover back and forth between WiMAX and Wi-Fi modes.

But why should you? Well, you won’t. Wireless System-on-Chip (SoC) manufacturers are anticipating market needs by developing single-chip multi-protocol Medium Access Controller (MAC) solutions.

For example, TeleCIS Wireless recently announced it is developing a multi-protocol broadband wireless chip combining 802.16e/WiMAX "mobile" and the company's Wi-Fi protocols in a single ASIC. This chip is said to allow end-users to seamlessly connect to the most appropriate network—anytime and anywhere—and provide a compelling solution for WiMAX operators, user terminal device manufacturers and end-users.

In addition to multi-protocol capability, wireless modems are being enhanced with smart antenna technology, which is said to improve performance by as much as 20 dB over systems without the technology. That’s got to reduce power and enhance portable battery life. Cell phone systems already have employed this steering-and-focusing technology to enable wide coverage with very low power.

ArrayComm has extensively deployed smart antenna and spatial processing technologies worldwide, and announced that it will be implementing those same solutions with TeleCIS to deliver significantly higher coverage quality and data rates for WiMAX client devices. This joint-development agreement will ensure the maximum benefits afforded by smart antenna technology to terminal device manufacturers who build their products with TeleCIS WiMAX mobile chipsets.

"It is no great revelation to note that the success of WiMAX will depend on the availability of cost-effective services and cost-effective cell coverage," said Peter Jarich, principal analyst at Current Analysis. "Smart antenna technologies have long been praised for their ability to improve wireless coverage and capacity. Integrating them with 802.16 solutions has the potential to boost the credibility of WiMAX as a viable, mass-market broadband technology."

It looks as if we will all eventually be playing it “smart” as these new battery-sipping multi-protocol and smart antenna technologies enhance our freedom-of-mobility experience in the ubiquitous WiMAX/Wi-Fi world.

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