Please tell me Wi

The saga of WiMax standard ratification and roll-out might appear to be over, at least as far as defining the standard is concerned and getting the first certified products on the market, but there is a LOT of confusion around as to what WiMax is, what it will do and when it will be available in its various flavours.
I have attempted to get to the bottom of what's there and what isn't, and what the capabilities of Wimax are (or should be) today, i.e. now. I got some of this from the Wimax forum site, but it wasn't as informative as it should have been.

• There are several parts to the standard, much as with Wifi, 802.16a, 802.16-2004 and 802.16e
• The 802.16e (mobile Wimax) is a full cellular specification for Wimax and was approved by IEEE on 7th December 2005. Roll-out of 802.16e is still some way off!
  
• Current certified products are for 802.16-2004 , which is known as 'fixed/portable' WiMax
• Theoretical maximum throughput is 134Mbps/channel, but we're not going to get close to that (remember 3G and 2Mbps/channel?)
  
• Base station range is somewhere from 2km to 50km (talk about vague!) depending on conditions. In Non Line of Sight (NLOS) expect no more than 8km range and throughput of between 1 and 2MBps, though Intel etc claim much more. (Hey, why not set yourself up for a pleasant as opposed to unpleasant surprise!)
  
• 802.16-2004 works in the 2GHz - 11GHz range, i.e. public spectrum. Seems like it can also work up to 66GHz.

What really concerns me is the number of articles that claim that what we have now is some vestigial form of Wimax and that we really need to wait for Mobile Wimax before we can do anything really useful.
I'm not even sure that Mobile WiMax is relevant, as it doesn't seem to go beyond, or even match, say, Flarion Flash OFDM for data mobility and throughput (in worst case).

802.16-2004 seems to be pretty much 'Wide-Area WiFi', with around a 5km (average) cell size, for NLOS devices. Not quite as revolutionary as we were led to believe, or maybe I have taken the conservative view, but the key to its success is not how broadband (beyond 2MBps) it is or how mobile it is. The real key is making the customer device cheap enough to be included in all kinds of devices.

If you can buy an 802.16-2004 card for your laptop for $60 or get your PDA fitted out for a similar amount, then assuming the power requirements are not prohibitive, WiMax will be successful.
Current prices are around $5-10k for a Base Station and under $300 for the end user equipment (e.g. PC Card or 'modem') - I wouldn't mind being a WISP in BellSouth territory, when they start slowing down Google and Microsoft for not paying to use their pipes!

The beauty of Wireless is portability, not mobility. If I can't receive a movie while travelling at 70mph, I'll live with it. When your hotspot has a coverage area of around 80 sq km, then the ability to handover seamlessly has less urgency.
Mind you, I really can't remember the last time I had a mobile call drop on me while running down the street (ahem!), businesses demand reliability!