On The Road To A Wireless Internet, This Milepost MattersOn The Road To A Wireless Internet, This Milepost Matters

On the road trip toward a genuinely useable mobile Internet, we haven't even started the car yet. We're still playing rock-scissors-paper over who's going to ride shotgun. But a couple of things last week--Intel's announcements about WiMax chief among them--suggest the scenery is about to change.This article by Elena Malykhina and J. Nicholas Hoover gives our take on the state of WiMax and of wireless broadband more broadly. Our point of view: Intel's efforts to get mobile WiMax chips built into laptops are critical to spurring this market, much like the company did with Wi-Fi. There are key differences this time around, like spectrum needs and telecom resistance. But Intel's road map puts down some mileposts so we can start to realistically estimate how long till we get to the mobile Internet we dream of. (Coincidentally, The Register today offered its view of WiMax's dim prospects in the U.K.)

The next big wireless broadband news to watch for: Sprint says this summer it'll disclose what technology it'll use to build out its next-generation--that'd be 4G--network around the 2.5 GHZ spectrum it owns.