WiMax is still pretty popular in Japan, although some of the bands have been dropped for other uses, and speed is lower than it used to be. I used a WiMax wifi router up until a few months ago. I only got rid of it because of covid; I'm not out of the house much. It was under $10 a month for almost unlimited usage (mine was supposed to throttle after 10GB used in 3 days but in practice it didn't). While slow (generally 10Mbps), it was nice to have always-available internet without worrying about finding coffee shop wifi or using my limited smartphone data for tethering.<p>This news is about dropping support for a specific WiMax chip. It shouldn't affect many current users who would be using a discrete wifi device that connects by wifi or USB.
If anyone is curious where WiMAX was used, it was the "4G" support that Sprint implemented, starting with the HTC Evo 4G in 2010 and what Vivi Wireless used in Australia.
From a purely code/tech perspective, was there anything interesting about the WiMAX support?<p>Did it bring anything new to the linux kernel itself?<p>(...other than the obvious fact that it implemented WiMAX?)
Another example of the Linux Kernel not scaling because of the lack of stable driver API.<p>You are supposed to put your driver in the tree for it to stay compatible, but it gets removed if there are too few users!
WiMAX is extremely common in Japan, with tens of millions of subscribers, though I'm not aware of anyone who uses it with native drivers. It's all WiMAX to WiFi/USB pocket routers and the like, regardless of how you connect to them Linux will just see some flavor of a cooked Ethernet interface.<p>It would be interesting if anyone is actually using this at the lower layer with these drivers though. I've never heard of it. It seems like a closed ecosystem where the ISPs always provide the equipment.