Reversing the trend: wired vs wireless

Wireless communications is less reliable than wired communications: this is what we have known for ages. However, this does not seem to be case at least in Bangalore, India. I was having a wired communication at home from Tata Indicom. I used to file 1-2 complaints per week for lack of Internet connectivity and some of the complaints used to be not taken care of for several days (even for 2 weeks). I was getting very frustrated and then decided to take the risk with WiMAX. Believe it or not, I have no loss of Internet connectivity for six consecutive weeks. That is amazing, given the performance I was getting.

Why wired was not working:

1. Copper is expensive and I guess, the metal market is soaring. So, copper wires were getting stolen and sold in the market. Wire cut was the most common phenomenon. There was even a suggestion, that fiber might be cheaper to maintain because the thieves have not yet figured out a way to steal fiber.
2. The trees snap the wires frequently. If the service provider does not have the permission to dig for deploying connections, the wires are all hanging from tree tops and you can have outages easily.
3. Adapters at intermediate points are getting stolen and junction boxes for multiple customers are placed in varied locations at the mercy of house owners.

Why WiMAX is working:

1. Subscriber antenna directly gets the signal from the base station and all the problems in maintaining the wires are gone. Less maintenance cost and i am not sure of the CAPEX numbers.

Challenge in the days to come:

1. Now we are at 256-384 kbps bandwidth range. When the requirement becomes high, it would be interesting to see whether wired connections are again required. Meanwhile, WiMAX seems to be good. I cannot watch a video streaming well, at least I am always connected when I do not have power at home.

In theory, wired is better than wireless, but in practice, the reverse is true in India.