Brief Introduction of Wimax and the Applications in Taiwan

Abstract

This paper discusses Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) which is an emergent broadband wireless technology. Compared with previous BWA (Broadband Wireless Access) technology, WiMAX is low-cost, faster , and providing broader coverage. This paper will describe the characteristics of the technology, summarize how it can be applied to enhance the community connectivity , and introduce the applications of WiMAX in Taiwan.

Introduction of WiMAX

According to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), broadband connectivity accelerates the contribution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to economic growth, facilitates innovation, promotes efficiency and offers other positive economic outcomes. For example, in 2008, “mobile workers” account for 72.2 % of the American workforce and that figure is expected to be 75.5 % by 2013, representing 119.7 million workers. Within any one company, a substantial percentage of the workforce may be mobile. At IBM, 160,000 of 400,000 employees do at least some of their work while on the move (Marian，Suman, & H. Joseph, 2011). Due to the high implementation costs and a low-return on investment, a lot of governments and operators try to avoid the fixed wire technologies such as ADSL in many instances. Although satellite technology can almost cover anywhere of the planet and is excellence in quality, however, the cost is expensive. To overcome these issues, development practitioners, technologists, and telecommunications operators have made joint efforts in the search for suitable technical solutions（Karanasios & Allen, 2010）.

At present, there are four different kinds of wire-less technology standards as pictrue1 shows below. Personal Area Network (PAN) is designed to connect the network among people who are quite close to each other. Local Area Network (LAN) is designed to connect a group computers which are close proximately to each other, for instance, in a office building, in a school or in a home. Wide Area Network (WAN) is designed to cover a large geographic area such as a state, a province or a country. Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) is designed to span usually a city range of network. Those different technologies are based on different wireless communication standards. Picture1 below shows the relationships and differences among them.

Picture 1

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WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is a kind of MAN communication technology designed to wirelessly transmit high-speed Internet service to large geographical areas and be compatible with both fixed and mobile broadband applications. In 2005, WiMAX’s revision

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