I remember visiting a good buddy of mine in 2005 and leafing through a magazine about IT and computers that his brother regularly read. I would usually glance through the mostly boring software and hardware sections (they were boring to the teen me) and jump straight to the video game reviews, but I’d occasionally read a piece about some cool and futuristic new technology the 2000s were brimming with. This time, it was an article about WiMAX, touted as the Wi-Fi killer and the future of wireless broadband.

I’d found that same article online a few days ago and read it again, and the tone and language treated WiMAX like some kind of sci-fi tech that would provide ultra-fast wireless internet, with a single base station capable of covering a mid-size city thanks to WiMAX’s 30-mile range and maximum bandwidth of 75Mbps, which was huge 20+ years ago. The article isn’t in English, so I won’t link it here, but here’s a Wired piece from 2004 that reads more or less the same, only without the nitty-gritty technical details.

Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I’d bet most people have no idea what WiMAX is or remember the hype surrounding it in the second half of the aughts. But for a few years, everyone was aboard the WiMAX train, harping on about how it would revolutionize internet access and dominate everything from home internet to mobile networks. Considering no one talks about it these days, you can guess how things played out.

9/10

Brand

Unifi

Range

1,750 square feet

The Unifi Dream Router 7 is a full-fledged network appliance offering NVR capabilities, fully managed switching,a built-in firewall, VLANs, and more. With four 2.5G Ethernet ports (one with PoE+) and a 10G SFP+ port, the Unifi Dream Router 7 also features dual WAN capabilities should you have two ISP connections. It includes a 64GB microSD card for IP camera storage, but can be upgraded for more storage if needed. With Wi-Fi 7, you’ll be able to reach up to a theoretical 5.7 Gbps network speed when using the 10G SFP+ port, or 2.5 Gbps when using Ethernet. 

What is WiMAX anyway?

Not the same as Wi-Fi

WiMAX, short for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, was developed by the WiMAX Forum and standardized by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), the same organization that developed the 802.11 family of standards, also known as Wi-Fi standards. WiMAX is based on the 802.16 family of standards, covering everything from fixed broadband wireless internet access to cellular phone networks.

The two most important WiMAX standards were IEEE 802.16-2004, amended by IEEE 802.16e-2005, and IEEE 802.16m. The former covered fixed broadband internet access, while the latter defined mobile network access, including mobile broadband.

In its early days, WiMAX held a lot of promise because it was seen as a wireless alternative to the last-mile broadband internet access provided by DSL and cable. This was especially significant in developing countries, where wired internet infrastructure was often in a sorry state or simply underdeveloped, and where the cost of upgrading and expanding it would have been astronomical. Back then, other forms of fixed wireless internet were still in their infancy, required line-of-sight to base stations, had relatively short range, offered slow speeds, and were expensive.

A single WiMAX base station, on the other hand, had a range of about 31 miles (50 kilometers) and a maximum bandwidth of about 75Mbps, which sounded out of this world back in 2004. Theoretically, one WiMAX base station could serve thousands of users and cover a huge area. Build a couple of them, and you’ve got an affordable way to provide fast internet access to an entire city.

Credit: Dish / EchoStar

No cables were needed because WiMAX nodes could communicate with one another, so in theory you only had to provide wired backhaul to one or a couple of nodes on the network, which was much more affordable than covering the same area with wired infrastructure. End users would have outdoor or indoor receivers that connected to WiMAX base stations and provided a stable and fast internet signal.

But that wasn’t all, because you could equip laptops with WiMAX cards that looked similar to modern Wi-Fi cards, and the promise was that WiMAX would find its way into mobile phones sooner rather than later. WiMAX was also interesting because, in combination with VoIP, it could theoretically replace both landlines and mobile networks. Since the technology had a massive range, you could, in theory, have broadband internet access on your laptop or phone anywhere, anytime. All you had to do was wait a bit for WiMAX to mature.

But in reality, things weren’t so rosy. Bandwidth dropped considerably with distance. At the edge of a WiMAX base station’s coverage, you’d usually get only about 1Mbps or so, along with massive latency that could sometimes be as high as one second. Even customers located near base stations could expect speeds of only about 30Mbps. On average, you could expect bandwidth of around 10Mbps or lower with fairly high latency, which made WiMAX a decent option, but far from the disruptive technology everyone touted it as.

Credit: Lucas Gouveia / How-To Geek | Gabo_Arts / Shutterstock

While described as Wi-Fi on steroids, WiMAX didn’t really compete with Wi-Fi. In fact, WiMAX equipment provided by ISPs often used Wi-Fi and Ethernet to provide internet connectivity to home and business users.

That said, the technology was more similar to Wi-Fi than to 2G and 3G technologies used for mobile networks back in the day, such as GSM and UMTS. For instance, WiMAX pioneered a few technologies later implemented in Wi-Fi standards, such as MIMO and OFDM. Still, there are important differences between the two.

While Wi-Fi is a short-range system utilizing the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands (and nowadays also the 6GHz band) to provide access to a LAN (local area network), which doesn’t even have to be connected to the internet, WiMAX is a long-range system with coverage spanning tens of miles that mostly utilized the 2.3GHz, 2.5GHz, and 3.5GHz bands to deliver internet or mobile network connectivity.

Furthermore, devices equipped with Wi-Fi can communicate directly with each other, while WiMAX requires a connection to a base station to provide internet access. There are many more nitty-gritty differences between the two, but this is the gist. While it was often described as “Wi-Fi, but better,” WiMAX and Wi-Fi were never really competitors.

The real battle was between WiMAX and LTE

You can guess which one won

Credit: Dave Bennett / YouTube

The technology WiMAX ended up battling against was LTE (Long-Term Evolution). While WiMAX arrived during the age of 3G mobile networks, it wasn’t ready to compete with CDMA and UMTS because it was still in its infancy during the period when 3G networks ruled supreme.

But by the end of the aughts and in the early 2010s, the mobile WiMAX standard, IEEE 802.16m, had been finalized, positioning WiMAX as one of the contenders for the then-upcoming 4G era of mobile networks. It could achieve theoretical maximum speeds of up to 100Mbps on mobile devices and up to 1Gbps on stationary access points, and thanks to its long range, it could compete with LTE networks.

In 2008, Sprint launched its WiMAX-based network, promoting it as the first 4G mobile network in the US and beating LTE to the punch by a few years. The move had its origins in Sprint’s acquisition of Nextel, which included a large amount of 2.5GHz spectrum licenses, so Sprint decided to use them to propel itself to the front of the high-speed mobile broadband market.

And for a short time, WiMAX worked reasonably well as a mobile network backbone. It provided speeds of up to 10Mbps at a time when 3G networks offered only a few megabits per second at best, had decent range, and could also be used for fixed internet access.

But on the other side stood an 800-pound gorilla in the form of LTE. Unlike WiMAX, LTE had the entire telecom industry behind it, along with phone manufacturers and governments. WiMAX, on the other hand, was backed by Intel, Sprint, Clearwire, a couple of internet providers such as Comcast and Time Warner, and a number of smaller ISPs as well as WiMAX equipment manufacturers.

By the early 2010s, the vast majority of mobile carriers around the world had embraced LTE, which was cheaper to implement because it evolved from earlier GSM and UMTS technologies and due to economies of scale. LTE also offered higher speeds, better indoor reception, and broader global support. In comparison, WiMAX deployments using the 2.5GHz spectrum often struggled with indoor reception, especially in high-rise buildings.

WiMAX remained a relatively niche technology that ended up being expensive to implement compared to LTE, and mobile phone manufacturers simply weren’t interested in producing many WiMAX-enabled devices. You had the infamous HTC Evo 4G, which suffered from poor indoor reception that often resulted in battery drain, the Nokia N810 tablet, the HTC Max 4G released for the Russian market in 2008, the HTC Evo 3D, as well as a few WiMAX variants of Samsung and Motorola Android phones released in 2010 and 2011.

LTE also became the better choice for home internet because it was fast, had excellent indoor reception, and spread like wildfire around the world. During the 2010s, many developing countries opted for LTE instead of WiMAX to expand internet coverage.

The battle between LTE and WiMAX was swift and one-sided. LTE won after just a few years, becoming the dominant 4G standard worldwide. Sprint began introducing LTE in 2012 and fully shut down its WiMAX network in 2016. A decade later, WiMAX is mostly forgotten.

Nowadays, WiMAX is all but consigned to the halls of history

WiMAX enjoyed limited success in the second half of the aughts as an alternative to wired and fixed wireless internet, but it quickly faded into oblivion because of LTE’s rise. LTE replaced WiMAX as the go-to way to provide fast wireless internet to areas without access to high-speed cable and fiber infrastructure, while WiMAX never managed to replace traditional fixed wireless internet solutions in rural areas.

Nowadays, WiMAX still survives in a few niches. Some countries use it as backhaul for smart meters, you can still find a handful of WISPs (wireless internet service providers) offering fixed WiMAX internet access in rural areas, and some companies continue using WiMAX equipment for industrial connectivity and enterprise wireless backhaul.

But most of the world has moved on. When it comes to fixed internet access, cable and fiber rule supreme, while LTE and 5G dominate wireless connectivity. WiMAX, on the other hand, is now little more than a footnote in the history of telecommunications technologies.