STOCKHOLM (WiMAX Day) by Joachim Bamrud. Patients in the city of Umeå, in northern Sweden, are among the first in the world to benefit from an innovative use of WiMAX. Healthcare personnel now visit patients in their homes and use WiMAX for consultations.

“Together with Umeå, we have equipped a car with WiMAX enabling higher bandwidth as far as where the patient lives, even if the patient doesn’t have access to broadband,” Carl-Daniel Norenberg, head of Intel’s public sector development in Scandinavia, told WiMAX Day. “The healthcare provider can bring with her all the [patient’s] data from the hospital and transmit [back] to the hospital, connecting the patient with video or IP to the doctor.”

A similar solution is being introduced in the Stockholm Archipelago (Skärgården), an area that stretches 60 miles east from the Swedish capital and consists of more than 24,000 islands. “The Skärgården [solution] can access a second opinion doctor or specialist. If for example you have some spots on your skin, the (solution enables users) to send pictures to a specialist who says it’s nothing to worry about or this is smallpox! The patient saves a lot of time and doesn’t have to go to the hospital any more [for the initial consultation],” Norenberg says.

The archipelago wireless service goes well beyond medical consultations. It is part of a broader service provided by Swedish operator Nilings. “The customer feedback is excellent,” says Heikki Harkonen, a wireless services executive at Intel in Stockholm. Users in Skärgården “only get 2 Mb [of data transfer per second], but for people who could only get 9.6 Kb over GSM, it has opened a new world for them. They can run their businesses from the archipelago.” The WiMAX service enables the connection to reach areas they otherwise wouldn’t have reached, Harkonen says.

Intel is also involved in a project to make Stockholm proper wireless through WiMAX. That project is being spearheaded by the Stockholm City telecom company Stokab. “We are working with the city of Stockholm to create a fully wireless city,” says Harkonen.

To increase the use of WiMAX services in Sweden, more spectrum will be auctioned. After 3.4–3.6 GHz spectrum was auctioned in 2002 and 2003, the Swedish telecom regulator PTS now plans to auction 3.6–3.8 GHz spectrum, according to Urband Landmark, head of the mobile and wireless broadband section at PTS.

Intel executive Norenberg sees WiMAX as a technology that soon will enable the reality of the wireless society. Crucial to this will be the interoperability of services that will provide “the capability of seamlessly connecting to mobile, WiMAX, GPRS, Edge, HSCDA, etc.” Norenberg sees future WiMAX installations that will function much like GSM roaming. With mobile WiMAX deployment, Norenberg commented: “It will be just like today, when you go to another country with your mobile phone and it automatically connects with a new signal.”