Montreal Tech Watch

Canoe reports that Nomad is giving up on its project to install a city-wide wimax network because of the high costs.

Nomad announced with Radioactif last year that they would market a mobile high-speed internet plan to 90% of Montréalers, along with a voip and digital TV plan. Nomad was then presented as the technical consultant in charge of installing routers and antenas, but it seems they understimated costs, which are said to be on average $700 to cover a square-kilometer-wide area.

Nomad’s CEO also mentionned that it costs $75million to buy a wimax license in Canada, which they are unable to cope up with, and is crying lamenting at the end of the story that small technology companies can’t do anything against the likes of Bell or Rogers. It’s noteworthy that both telecom companies already maintain a (pre)-wimax technology in Canada, named Inukshuk, and therefore are in no hurry to update their network.

Wimax was announced to be the new technology that would take over UMTS and 3G networks, wifi, and even regular broadband Internet. It seems though that wimax is too costly and has too many shortcomings. A week ago, an australian telecom company, buzz broadband, complained loudly on their wimax venture, which revealed to be a disaster after spending dozens of millions of dollars in the technology; while Comcast, Time Warner, Google and Intel announced two days ago a new partnership of $4 billion in order to save all investments already made.

So we are now back at square one. Regular wifi still rules in Montréal, and the market is still waiting for a mobile high-speed data network.