By now, most people in the networking industry have given up the concept of crisscrossing wires in 24 port hubs and routers to connect computers in different office floors. The cost of setting up a wireless network has gone down. Wi-fi hotspots have sprouted in cities like mushroom patches, in internet cafes and coffee shops, 24/7 convenience stores and gas stations, even in bars and restaurants. However, the coverage of wi-fi is only small. It is time for the next big thing, WiMax. To avail of this amazing technology, a wimax base station must be set-up first.
Wimax stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. It is a telecommunications technology that provides wireless internet access on a much larger scale. In the same way that cellular phones have replaced conventional telephones, wimax replaces conventional broadband internet access and aims to take wireless internet to the next level. It operates on the same concept wherein instead of a cellular site; you have a wimax base station. One of the main components of the wimax base station is its wimax tower. The wimax tower is capable of providing coverage for wimax up to 3,000 square miles. Inside the wimax base station, internet bandwidth is at least 3 Mbit/s and can reach up to 70 Mbit/s, without the need of any cables. And even if that bandwidth will be split between several thousand individual and non-individual users, the resulting bandwidth would still be the speed of a cable-modem to each user, still quite fast compared to present day wi-fi.