Speakeasy will begin beaming a WiMAX-class service from the Space Needle and other buildings in downtown Seattle in what is described as the largest, high-density, point-to-multipoint broadband wireless service in a major U.S. city. Speakeasy, which has formed strategic relationships with Intel and Alvarion to test WiMAX, said it chose Seattle as the first site for its WiMAX-class deployment because of Seattle’s challenging combination of weather, terrain, bodies of water, and dense building skyline. The service uses Alvarion’s base station and end user hardware. The network will feature overlapping base stations to provide higher throughput per subscriber and greater dependability.
Speakeasy is currently taking customer orders and expects to bring customers online in early June. Business rates begin at $500 per month for a 3 Mbps connection and $800 per month for a 6 Mbps connection. The bandwidth can be partitioned into reserved uplink and downlink allotments.
http://www.speakeasy.net/business/wimax/
