River cruise shows off Chicago’s WiMAX

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a historic trip, that started on the Chicago River aboard this WiMAX-ready ship.
The skipper was skinny and Gilligan was nowhere in sight, but WiMAX chipsets were sending signals all over a 2.5-mile long stretch of the Chicago River Tuesday night as Motorola Inc. took a 100-plus crew of top WiMAX executives and others on a river cruise to demonstrate the technology and the first-ever WiMAX handoff on 802.16e.
Thirty feet below street level in an “urban canyon,” as one Motorola executive described it, Motorola showed off its new consumer-ready and prototype equipment running on a temporary trial network Sprint-Nextel Corp. helped the company build for the test and demo. The location selected for the demonstration presented some of the most challenging RF propagation environments imaginable, the companies said.
For those not impressed by the handoffs required as the boat chugged along at 5 mph, Motorola said it has also trialed the same network at speeds up to 50 mph along the river, rail and surrounding streets.
“We’ve committed a lot of the company’s resources” to WiMAX, Motorola executive Dan Maloney said. “It’s the beginning of what we think is a great, great evolution.”
Executives from Sprint, Intel Corp., Clearwire Corp. and Motorola were all on deck to schmooze with analysts and press as a group of marketers walked around the ship with an array of WiMAX-equipped devices from handsets to tablet PCs and routers.
A pair of HP tablet PCs used prototype WiMAX PC cards with MIMO antennae technology as they ran incoming and outgoing video feeds between each device, played video from CNN, viewed Web pages and more-all simultaneously. A RAZR-like device that Motorola only called a “WiMAX trial handset” ran a slew of IP-based applications such as VoIP, Web browsing, video clips from YouTube and SMS. Motorola plans to release multimode handset in the second half of 2008. The company also showcased a laptop PC using the WiMAX trial handset for connectivity.
“This is just a sample of what our service is going to look like across the country,” Barry West, president of Xohm and CTO of Sprint, said in opening remarks.
“Problems that we’re having are insignificant,” he said, adding that the company looks forward to a full commercial launch next April.
The demonstration used six access points in four locations built along the Chicago River. At the East end of the river, it ran off sites built at Merchandise Mart at 222 Merchandise Mart Plaza and a building at 180 N. Wacker Dr. On the West end of the river, it pulled from sites at the Hyatt Hotel at 151 E. Wacker Dr. and Motocity at 233 N. Michigan Ave.
Motorola also had a series of indoor and outdoor WiMAX routers on hand that are developed and ready for purchase by consumers. The Motorola Wireless Broadband Gateway line of products include: CPEi850 for the 3.5 GHz band (as well as Wi-Fi connectivity), CPEi600 also for the 3.5 GHz band, CPEi300 for 2.3 GHz, 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz, and the CPEo400 for outdoor installation.
Sprint and Motorola say they’ve experienced speeds up to 5 Mbps on the downlink and 1.5 Mbps on the uplink using the pre-commercial network. They quickly add that throughput is only limited by the 5.5 Mbps leased backhaul system that uses four T1 lines from an Internet service provider. Motorola says the battery draw from the WiMAX chipset is comparable to Wi-Fi.