The windy, US city of Chicago played host to this week’s WiMAX World Conference. At the center of the show was ebullient host Motorola, glad to have some good news for a change after several ignominious quarters.
Kudos to the handset maker for the great idea of demo-ing its new WiMAX 802.16e mobile handoffs across a Sprint brand Xohm prototype network on a boat cruising downtown Chicago’s skyscraper-canyoned mid-town river.
Not only was it good clean fun for the attendant pundits, punters and analysts, it was an impressive real-life demonstration of an important nascent technology that they could just as easily, and less expensively have unveiled in the controlled environs of the conference hall – boring as hell like usual – but they did not.
Motorola and gang literally went the extra mile by also mounting the new WiMAX exhibition on a rolling Chicago public transit coach caroming about the city’s elevated metro tracks at 50 miles per hour, all the while delivering pretty seamless mobile apps like web browsing, VoIP, video streaming and Mobile TV.
Fred Wright, Motorola senior VP of Home & Networks Mobility said in a statement that the company “has reached a significant milestone … proving through these demonstrations that mobile WiMAX is real and ready for commercial deployment.
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