Northern Michigan University (NMU), located in Marquette, Michigan, will operate a WiMAX network exclusive to university staff and students, and include the costs of the network in the school’s tuition. Each student will be issued a Lenovo laptop with built in WiMAX capability. The network will cover the entire city of Marquette. Like many other universities, NMU had been offering a campus-wide Wi-Fi network. The university demonstrated their new WiMAX capability on Thursday August 20th.
I wonder how other ISPs in the area view this development. By providing this city wide coverage, the university basically removed thousands of potential customers from the market – a huge hit for a small market like Marquette, which is currently served by AT&T, Charter, and few smaller ISPs. What do you think — all’s fair in love and ‘broadband war?’
