WiMAX Watch: WiMAX on the Inner Harbor
As promised, Gus' report by land and sea (sorry, not by air, though, since planes were not made available) on the WiMAX presser this morning. -- DD:
Let's say you're lucky enough to have a boat. One day, you want to guide that boat up the bay and hang out in the Inner Harbor. While you're on your boat -- enjoying a better life than most of us while taking in the view of the Domino Sugar plant and other sites -- you want to surf the Web, watch online movies and play Web games.
Sprint says now you can do all that on their new wireless broadband network, which they're calling XOHM. They're providing the new Internet connection -- but you still gotta buy the boat. Earlier today, Sprint held their official launch of their XOHM network in Fells Point. Baltimore is the first city in the country to have access to XOHM -- but many more cities are expected to follow, including Washington and Chicago in the coming months.
Sprint officials demonstrated how well you can catch the network on the water by ferryin those of us in the technology press corps around the harbor on Water Taxis. They provided wireless connected laptops on board. It woulda been more fun if I wasn't working. And, if it was a sunnier day, I might've gotten a tan -- er, rather, a sunburn. (I don't tan.) But least I didn't get seasick. (Yes, I am a land-lubber.)
A small group of geeky-looking guys -- including me -- jumped on a Water Taxi off Thames Street, in the heart of Fells Point. As we pushed away from the dock, Jian Khodad, a business development director for XOHM, started talking about XOHM.
"XOHM wants to be simple to the end user. The experience needs to be simple," he said. "There are no long-term contracts."
Some of the folks on the taxi started pawing at the five laptops that were waiting for them on a bench. The boat veered toward the Inner Harbor; soon, we were passing Harbor East to the north. A XOHM engineer did speed tests to demonstrate how fast the connection was on the water.
One laptop computer was downloading data from the Internet at 4.8 megabits per second -- which is comparable, if not better, than the typical wired broadband connection you might find at your home. Uploading information occurred at a brisk 1.1 megabits per second. Again, better than decent -- considering we were out in the middle of the harbor and bobbing on mildly choppy waters.
Some of the media representatives were taking tons of pictures of the laptops on the boat (okay, I was, too.) I took a bunch of Andy Carvin, NPR's social media strategist, while he played with a laptop and tried to take pictures of it with the Domino Sugar plant as a backdrop.
After we debarked (Yay! No nausea! No vomiting!), I was immediately whisked into an interview with some representatives from Intel (which I'll tell you about in a later blog post).
When that was done, I toured a tastefully appointed house on the Fells Point waterfront that Sprint had rented to demonstrate how the network can be used at home. (They rented a Thames Street house that was on the market for $1.6 million, just for the day, a XOHM guy told me.)
There, I saw for the first time Sprint's "home" modem, which is what a customer would use to connect to the network from a fixed location. (I think it looks like a fancy European-made coffee grinder -- all black and sleek.) This modem was connected to a laptop computer -- and the computer was connected to a HUGE 50+ inch flat panel television.
On the computer, I visited Hulu.com-- a popular site for watching good-quality video on the Web -- and started watching the opening segment from last week's Saturday Night Live. I was impressed that the video appeared on the television in very good quality, with no breaks or hiccups. I was watching really good video on a very big television -- via the wireless Internet. Wow.
So with this set-up, Sprint was basically showing how you can hook up your super-expensive TV to the Internet, without too many wires, and surf the Web while sitting on your super-expensive leather couch, with your big boat docked outside -- should you need to cruise the harbor with your XOHM-connected laptop.
Talk about mind-blowing. My cell phone is still circa 2002. [ed note: So if I get WiMAX, will the super-expensive leather couch, house and boat eventually come with it? If so, sign me up. -- DD]
Posted by Dan Thanh Dang at 4:00 PM | Permalink
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Categories: Computers, Technology, WiMAX Watch
Categories: Computers, Technology, WiMAX Watch
