There is a good chance that the words that you are reading now are coming over a broadband connection, like a DSL/cable Internet service. However, if you were in a remote farm in New Zealand, searching the Web for the right fertilizer to raise your crops, you might be using a dial-up connection over a noisy telephone line. But with WiMax, which is capable of transmitting large amounts of data over long distances, you could be surfing the web looking for the appropriate fertilizer, over a 75Mbps connection without a wire!

In major metropolitan areas in the United States and many other countries, broadband access has been dominated by wired technologies such as DSL/cable, which use existing infrastructure such as telephone lines/television cable network to provide high speed Internet access. WLAN/WiFi® is another term often associated with high speed Internet though it is limited to local area networks (LAN). Whereas DSL/cable technologies operate at WAN/MAN (metropolitan area network) ranges. WiFi is designed to work with DSL/cable to share the Internet connection between several computers in a local home/office network.

By Ramakrishnan Parasuraman, DSP Software Systems Engineer,
Residential Gateway and Embedded Systems, 
Digital Signal Processing Systems, Texas Instruments Inc