Despite some hefty investments and even heftier plans among wireless infrastructure providers, serious adoption of WiMax by American businesses is several years away, and even widespread consumer applications are a couple of years off. But that's not stopping everyone from telecommunications firms to automakers to dream about what might be.
WiMax--or as it is rarely called, the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access--is an emerging alternative to WiFi that offers a few key advantages. WiMax transmitters deliver a wireless signal for several miles compared with the 100-to-300-foot range of most Wi-Fi transmitters, and WiMax features superior authentication and encryption schemes to WiFi, making it harder for hackers to spoof the identities of users.
Source: CIO Insight, http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Strategy/WiMax-Obstacles-to-Enterprise-Adoption/