"Richard Clark"
If you want to share the same resource
with 33 times more customers, you have
to accept 3% the bandwidth.

Excellent point.

Of course, to start, they could put up one site and let it evolve from
there. 56Mbps / 33 is still 1.7 Mbps (perfectly acceptable). Even 333
clients is still much better than dial-up. Also, those 333 clients probably
have other things to do beside 100% downloading music and p0rn, and so you
can add a huge (or 1/huge) duty-cycle factor (worse at prime time). In other
words, one 56Mbps access point is capable of serving MANY clients (a
wireless MAN). The future dividing into smaller cells is a nice bonus that
can be paid for with cash already earned from the first installation. Thus
Wi-Max is going to be ~huge~ because the finances are incredibly good (waaay
better than cell phone since the sites are going to be sooooooo much
cheaper, one or two orders of magnitude cheaper, a guess).

BTW, if the 'last mile' is such a big problem, then how come the Cable TV
companies are so damn rich? Duh. Run the damn optical fibres and 'clean up'
the whole market for fixed access. Nothing beats optical (so far).

Didja see the 'interesting tidbit' about non-HF 'BPL' ? Sounds much nicer
than the HF-crap system.