WiMax at airports

WiMax's first commercial rollout may very well be at U.S. airports. The goal is to provide a faster upload of manifests, flight plans and onboard entertainment for incoming aircraft. For those not familiar with the term, WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is a wireless industry coalition whose members organized to advance IEEE 802.16 standards for broadband wireless access (BWA) networks. In other words, WiMax is like WiFi on steroids, faster connections covering a wider area. It is interesting to see our industry embrace WiMax as a way to improve productivity. Proximetry, a San Diego based company who provides the software for this initiative hopes to use WiMax to replace the current "sneaker net" process in respect to uploading information on board. It is unclear if the same WiMax technology could be used by consumers.