WiMAX or Wi-Fi: The Best Suited Candidate Technology for Building Wireless Access Infrastructure

With the help of many expert communication engineers IEEE has developed various wireless standards in a hierarchical fashion. Some of the deployed wireless standards are: 802.15 (Bluetooth), 802.11 (Wi-Fi), and 802.16 (WiMAX) promoted by WiMAX forum. Recently a new standard, 802.20 for WANs has been proposed, which is currently under development. Each of these IEEE standards has been deployed to fulfill certain criteria and they complement each other. IEEE 802.11 also known as Wi-Fi standards has had a lot of commercial success, for this reason now the focus of wireless networking shifting to the wide area market. Wi-Fi has been optimized to address the requirements for home or office connectivity but the wide area market is still open to grabs.