WiMax to spread over UK within two years

There will be WiMax coverage across the UK within the next two years, the managing director of Intel Capital EMEA has claimed.

Speaking at a roundtable discussion on Thursday, Ashish Patel said the long-range wireless technology would find an enthusiastic audience among the users of mini-notebooks and other portable Web-surfing devices. WiMax is currently only available in very limited deployments in the UK and only in its "fixed" variant, with the prospects for "mobile WiMax" -- the type needed for portable devices -- depending on upcoming spectrum auctions.

Intel, the most prominent backer of WiMax, is planning to integrate the technology into its upcoming Centrino 2 platform by the end of this year, and is pumping money into companies all along the value chain, from component manufacturers to operators.

On Wednesday, a joint venture in the US was announced, involving Sprint Nextel and Clearwire, with $1bn (£511m) in funding from Intel and similarly large amounts from other players like Google, Comcast and Time Warner. This is the most significant WiMax-related deal to be struck in the developed world, as the technology has thus far proved most useful in countries where wired infrastructure is scarce, making it sensible and cost-efficient to skip straight to a high-bandwidth, wireless alternative like WiMax.

The Western European market will prove particularly tricky for WiMax because -- unlike the US -- the market is already full of entrenched 3G users. However, according to Patel, WiMax is not going to be a "competitor to 3G or DSL" -- rather it will form a new market -- and all the technologies can happily co-exist. On the subject of the sudden increase in 3G dongle usage in the UK, Patel said the trend "validates the market for mobile data" but said he was "convinced that, at some point, 3G will not be able to cope from a backhaul [and general traffic-management] perspective".