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Pipex has announced its sec­ond com­mer­cial trial of WiMAX in the UK. This is great news. Well it is if you live in War­wick. Oh and work for War­wick Coun­cil. You’ll be able to get an 8meg con­nec­tion wher­ever you roam (within War­wick that is). They also plan to roll out the trial to those out­side the coun­cil as well as to that dig­i­tal hotbed, Leam­ing­ton Spa.

WiMAX is often talked about as the holy grail of last mile / ubiq­ui­tous con­nec­tiv­ity. The abil­ity to have a robust broad­band con­nec­tion wher­ever, when­ever. We’ve already cov­ered Sin­ga­pore’s plans to offer full WiMAX cov­er­age to every sin­gle per­son and busi­ness by 2015. It’s an ambi­tious plan and has some way to go (espe­cially if like me, users can’t get speeds over 20 kB/sec when down­load­ing from their site).

What I like about the Sin­ga­pore approach is that there is a clear vision behind it. A sense of the greater good such a pro­gramme can achieve. Pipex’s, by com­par­i­son, seems to be all about tech­ni­cal fea­si­bil­ity and com­mer­cial via­bil­ity. These are both good things, of course, and to be expected from a com­mer­cial organ­i­sa­tion. They’re just not that excit­ing (and the prospect of the ser­vice being pro­moted even­tu­ally by David Has­sle­hoff frankly makes me a lit­tle nauseous).

But, you have to hope the pro­gramme is a suc­cess and spurs other providers to launch sim­i­lar plans. And the prospect of high-quality ubiq­ui­tous con­nec­tiv­ity is excit­ing. Of course, if you’ve paid out mil­lions on a 3G license, it might be a lit­tle less so.

Sources: Telecoms.com (reg­is­tra­tion required) and The Reg­is­ter

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