Big O

I'm in the Bay area of California and I too have noticed dramatic WiMax improvement recently. At home, WiMax is backup network for my wired service which has it's own set of issues. I'm at the last hop in for coverage in this area and discovered over time that there is a corridor where bandwidth was better (though not stellar) and the further away from this area, bandwidth seemed to drop by half at each tower site. At my location, 80KB down was the norm on a good day. Last week failing over to WiMax, I was seeing speeds ranging between 8 - 10MB down. Other than increased latency on WiMax, the overall experience was similar to my wired service.

FYI - Minnesota - St Cloud still has the legacy 3G 2.5/2.6GHZ service in operation. I did not check the coverage on the I-94 corridor to Albany. Backhaul to Brainerd appears to stop at Fort Ripley. The Crow Wing Lake site which also fed the Brainerd site has been disable due to facilities ownership change. Red Rock Radio purchased WWWI radio in Brainerd which leased tower space to Clearwire. Red Rock immediately canceled the carriers tower lease agreement and wanted to renegotiate at a substantially higher cost than Clearwire was wiling to pay.

Summer trip - Confirming Wadena, MN - Fargo, ND - Bismarck ND No Service in Billings, MT. Appears there was a carrier however no traffic accepted.