Nextel -cool!

Nextel’s FanView

Posted by samc on August 20th, 2007

NASCAR fans who rented FanView devices at Michigan International Speedway for the Busch race Saturday saw the video and data capabilities of WiMax, says the Detroit News.

FanView is a portable device that displays live racing video, scans car-to-pit radios and shows a plethora of real-time race data. You can buy one for $369.95 or rent one for $50 per race.

The FanView units at the speedway operate on the same mobile frequency and connect to Sprint’s network in a similar manner as WiMax devices will in the future.

“FanView shows that the video experience on the 2.5-gigahertz spectrum is superb,” said Atish Gude, Sprint senior vice president for mobile broadband operation. “In the future with WiMax you may be able to get the FanView experience through something like a portable DVD player, and perhaps from outside the track.”

Sprint hopes to expand the types of devices that can use the WiMax network to include digital cameras, portable DVD players and other electronics.

MobiTV and Sprint have demonstrated premium mobile television over a two-way IEEE 802.16e networks with both multicast and unicast streams at 30 frames per second. They use NDS VideoGuard (pdf) for Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Conditional Access (CA) with the MobiTV service.

WiMAX-TV is unusual in that it can switch from multicast (like broadcast television and Qualcomm’s MediaFLO), to unicast (like Verizon’s on demand, V-Cast cellular system), depending on the popularity of a stream.

Meanwhile, ZyXEL and Sprint announced today they will work together in a range of computing, portable multimedia, interactive and other business and consumer devices. ZyXEL’s WiMAX product line includes the MAX-100 PCMCIA card for mobile users and the MAX-200 router designed for home users, which will be used by Sprint.

source : dailywireless.org