I am quite hopeful about the prospects for WiMAX as an alternative to wires for the last mile delivery of broadband services to premises outside the reach of current ADSL implementations.
Whilst they don't yet cover St Albans, Urban WiMAX offer WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) based broadband services to (business) customers in London, UK. I am a bit confused as to why they don't offer service here as WiMAX has a stated range up to 30 miles and last time I checked we are only about 16 miles from central London.
Urban WiMAX provide symetric broadband up to 10Mbit/s (range dependent) and offer 'carrier c;ass' SLAs with minimal contention (according to their webiste).
The price (£99/month according to this document) is nearer to SDSL than ADSL and means it is suited to businesses which need the high service levels and symetric bandwidth rather than being a general replacement for ADSL at the moment. Hopefully the cost will fall over time.
