Milton Keynes first city in UK to get WiMax

After my last post regarding Pipex Wireless' successful WiMax trials in Stratford-upon-Avon, comes the news that favourite of town planners Milton Keynes will be the first city in the UK to get a WiMax network. Pipex apparently have plans for a phased roll out across the city, and will make an official announcement in a months time.

More interesting to me is the news that Pipex's longer term plans include a roll out across 8 UK cities, starting with London and Manchester. Interesting, in that it is all these cities that both the The Cloud and BT have implemented WiFi coverage, which suggests that Pipex at least are not listening to all the experts who say WiMax is only going to find a niche in providing broadband access to rural communities.

It looks to me like they are going ahead in direct competition to all WiFi providers and presumably wired broadband providers as well. This is of course the only market they can attack prior to WiMax mobile capabilities supposedly coming along in 2008. Still to compete with WiFi devices will also have to be WiMax enabled, which is certainly not the case at the moment. It will certainly be interesting to see how this develops.

News about Milton Keynes first seen at TechDigest