More Opportunities for Microwave Engineers

摘要

With the Microwave Journal (MWJ) November supplement "WiMAX and Emerging Technologies" hitting the streets and the WiMAX World and European Microwave Week (EuMW) conferences still fresh in the minds of those who attended, now seems like a great time to consider the impact these Utopian "wireless everywhere" systems will have on the health of our industry and related job security, Certainly the hype over WiMAX as well as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) is keeping the business and marketing departments employed and busy. Is this technology a panacea for the near and long-term engineering job market as well?rnAt WiMAX World, Sprint Nextel CTO, Barry West, stated, "all the emerging wireless technologies would be differentiated by the width of available spectrum channels and bound by physics." The wider spectrum of course will provide the speed and capacity necessary for the services (mainly the mobile Internet) to win over customers. The major service providers seem committed to the vision and are acknowledging the hardware challenges; chief among these are bandwidth, linearity, efficiency, size and cost. So what's the industry response?