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.
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.
No, WiMAX service in Japan was ended. Currently a service called "WiMAX 2+" is operated by same operator, but it's actually just a TD-LTE, zero compatible to WiMAX.
The branding is pretty confusing. My device/plan had HS mode which is apparently WiMax 2+/TD-LTE, and HS+A mode which is normal LTE and much faster. And, use of the much faster HS+A mode was limited to 7GB per month. Once you go over 7GB, the speed of both modes is throttled to 128kbps for the rest of the month.
The outdated wikipedia page for WiMAX[0] has been updated with the uncited statement:
The latest version of WiMAX, WiMAX release 2.1, popularly branded as/known as WiMAX 2+, is a backwards-compatible transition from previous WiMAX generations. It is compatible and interoperable with TD-LTE.
Does this mean that WiMAX 2.1 can talk to an original WiMAX network also also talk to an unrelated TD-LTE one as well?
My bet is that the device can be operated by an old WiMax driver, with maybe the same pinout, to make transitioning old designs to continue working in an LTE-only world with just a part substitution and some new config details.
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.