Customer Reviews

WiMax Operator's Manual: Building 802.16 Wireless Networks

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First up! Daniel Sweeney has come up with one of the first authoritative guides to WiMax. With the huge success of WiFi in many countries, some people have chafed at its short range of 100 meters or so, and its relatively low bandwidth. In response, the IEEE has come up with a standard, 802.16, better known as WiMax. It can offer some 70 Mbps, compared to 2Mbps for WiFi, and at a range of several kilometers. Very nice.

But WiMax introduces new complications, compared to a much simpler WiFi network. No one in the world has yet built an operational WiMax network that is available for public use. Though of course there has been small scale prototyping, which has undoubtedly helped the IEEE define the current WiMax standard.

Sweeney describes here what the features of a WiMax network would be. This book is not restricted to a hard core audience of hardware engineers or software developers. Instead, he has written it as a level accessible to technical managers, who might be considering such a network. There is roughly equal emphasis on both the technical issues of signal propagation and on the business issues of building and running the network.

Still early days yet for WiMax. Which is in fact one of the attractions of this book. Sweeney has given us enough information to seriously contemplate the top level design and economics of a network. Ahead of the curve.

The author is self-described as a "Business Reporter" and "Industry Analyst", which is fine and dandy in the context of delivering industry reports, etc. But it does not, in the least, qualify oneself as an expert on building wireless networks. And the author has never done so, which is glaringly apparent within the text.

I have designed, deployed, operated 15 wireless broadband networks, and had hoped that this book, as advertised, would provide insight into how designing and deploying WiMax networks would differ from current technologies (in terms of link budgets, costs, capacity, etc.), but that information is nowhere to be seen in this book. The author purports that the text is practical rather than technical, but it is neither. And then the author ensues on primarily technical treaties on wireless broadband, but unfortunately (in terms of RF engineering, the basis of WiMax), the author is as technically astute as a doorknob.

If you are looking to build a WISP (what this book is really about, not WiMax), there are much better books (Unger), written by people who actually speak from experience, and don't just write for a living.

let me say to those WiMax and Wireless technical experts out there, i have discovered that lazyness is a great crime when you are a technical expert. So i was being Lazy (confession) and decided to avoid writing an overview on WiMAX and an introduction to WiMax for my engineers, and decided that it would be good to simply buy a book and let them read it with their enthuast little engineering selves, as i did not want to get to the laymans level, could not be bothered, as i wanted to complete some traffic engineering work in WiMax i was working on. Well i could not beleive that a person could get away with selling such rubbish under the title of WiMax Operators Manual and Building 802.16, the whole thing is fraudlent in its entirity. I don't feel that i am in an arena to shout my credentials, lets just say i know a little about, 1G, 2G, 2.5G, 3G, WiFi, WiMAX and UWB and spends my time wondering about our gold fish bowl we call earth. Now in the record industry you can get away with recording rubbish because of who you know etc, i did not beleve that the same was possible in our technical intelligent community, i felt that i was part of an elite community, but it seems that we are being invaded by the dummkofs, with the relavent connections. Message to the dummkof that wrote this book try another career and the publishers, get yourself better technical people who know what they are reading and interperting and consiquently writing. Cause this book to me is an insult to my industry and fraudlent, would like my money back, but i know that is a waste of time. Lesson 1:- Not everything with written with the word Wimax is WiMAX (All that Glitters is not Gold) Can't even recommend it to my 5 year old he might throw it at me.

This relatively brief book is more network architect or designer centric, as opposed to a step-by-step walkthrough of network implementation. I personally find this high level approach refreshing, and I doubt anyone looking to set up wireless WANs would disagree as the problems are more in the design, signal propagation, spectrum planning and service provisioning. And these are the topic areas where the book excels.

Saw this one jutting out of shelf today, and I couldn't resist coming here and add a review -- even though I bought this in 2004 and should've added a review then. This book is a classic example of one that falls in a no-man's land. It doesn't suit someone who is managing a wireless deployment, because the stuff (chapter 2 & 3) that is mentioned is too basic; nobody would get to manage a network deployment without that basic amount of knowledge. It doesn't suit the network operations guy, because there is nothing in it for him; the entire OSS and wireless Security area is covered in about 4-5 pages each. It won't suit the field technician, because the material is way too basic, contains way too little information about relevant topics, and what it covers mostly seem to be fluff.

I don't deploy/manage wireless installations for a living, but wanted to know more about WiMax, both from a practical and theoretical standpoint. I did have some peripheral associations with the field. Perhaps, my choice of the book was wrong, and I can't blame the book for that; however, the book really do not address the needs of those it's intended, assuming it's intended for someone. I guess the publisher wanted to put a book out soon, since the term 'WiMax' was beginning to get press attention at that time.