WiMax Coming To 6 Million Rural CitizensWiMax Coming To 6 Million Rural Citizens

Rural WiMax provider Open Range Communications is reporting that it has signed a contract with Alvarion for the latter firm to provide an expected $100 million in products and services that will deliver WiMax to more than 500 rural communities in 17 states.

Announced this week, the service will be rolled out over a five-year period and is targeted to serve as many as 6 million people, who currently can't be served with high-speed Internet services at all or are underserved.

"New Open Range 4G network, based on Alvarion's WiMax Forum Certified 802.16e BreezeMAX solution, will be built with an all-IP architecture," the firms' release stated. The so-called 4G service will be provided on licensed spectrum and deliver minimum speeds of 1.5 Mbps down and 512 Kbps up, according to Open Range.

Although Intel -- the major developer of WiMax -- once declared 2008 "the year of WiMax," the high-speed wide area wireless service has been slow to take off in the United States, until Sprint Nextel and Clearwire began rolling out the service with a vengeance this year. Their Clear service is scheduled to be deployed at 80 urban areas in 2010 and is planned to deliver WiMax service to 120 million people.

Rural citizens -- long underserved with broadband -- have become a priority for the Obama administration and the Open Range-Alvarion deal appears to be a breakthrough for delivering broadband. In March, 2008, the Bush administration's Rural Development Utilities Program, a unit of the Agriculture Department, approved a $267 million broadband access loan for Open Range. The loan stipulated that private financing also be obtained and Open Range subsequently received a $100 million investment from a unit of JPMorgan Chase.

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