Is WiMax like the tragic Barbaro?
(Editor’s note: The wireless world is an important one, yet a jargon-filled one, so we asked investor Paul Grim to give us a lay of the land. We also asked him to spell out the acronyms, so that the rest of us can keep up. He wrote this several days ago, before the latest comments by a high-level Qualcomm exec, also critical of WiMax technology. Investors are plowing billions of dollars into WiMax.) In addition to the demise of the MENS Club, there were several other interesting insights to be found at the Orlando CTIA conference a few weeks back: Mobile Broadband is now a three-horse race, but one of them (mobile WiMax) may end up like Barbaro –- a visibly thrilling candidate that tragically crashes and burns in the final round. Broadly, there are three acronym-laden contenders for next-generation mobile broadband rollouts: • Ultra Mobile Broadband, or UMB: This is Qualcomm’s upgrade path from their current Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA) Evolution, Data-Only (EV-DO) networks. In
