It was recently brought to my attention that by the end of 2008, Sprint expects to have WiMax rolled out to 100 million people. Now while I found that to be a very interesting anecdote, I started to wonder what impact that’s going to have on webmasters.
While I’m sure it will have many small side effects, the one big splash in the pond that it will make is that it will bring mobile web browsing to the masses. While mobile web browsing has been around for a very long time, it’s always been a “cute” feature to toss into a device primarily feared towards something else. Combine that with the limited use of these devices 50 feet away from your house or office and it’s no wonder nobody’s really been using them that heavily to browse the web. What about cell phones you ask? Well the rates are pretty expensive so even though the technology is somewhat reasonable to use, it’s not cost effective.
City wide WiMax will change that. You could use your iPaq, Palm, laptop, etc… anywhere in your home city for one set monthly price. That’s different. That’s going to make it far more attractive to people commuting either on the bus or in the passenger seat of a car. That means that the long promised mobile surfer is finally going to be a reality.
While there are many, many implications to this change, one thing’s for sure. I’m going to have to make this website work better in mobile browsers…
accessibility, WiMax
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