The short answer is yes, as never before with broadband wireless systems. However, this area appears to be early ground that vendors are staking out to differentiate their products and philosophies. The WiMAX standard itself incorporates much better and more flexible security support than the Wi-Fi standard. It can be sometimes confusing when industry pundits and detractors talk of standards such as WiMAX and then in the same breath describe ways in which vendors will be "different" or that WiMAX security might be weak. At first glance, these comments on the part of some vendors zealous to promote the added capabilities of their products can leave one feeling uncertain about the quality and reliability of the product.
Security is probably a good place to explain the difference between the very robust base standards of WiMAX and the ways in which individual vendors can still differentiate their products (with additional and perhaps more powerful or convenient features) beyond the features that the base standard offers. We explain the base WiMAX security standard in a different FAQ question. However, what is important to understand is that it is quite robust. Perhaps more importantly, it allows for additional feature sets that could be added by various vendors to achieve security results as good as or better than any competing wireline broadband option even those being used for extremely secure governmental applications. Typical residential service does not require the kind of security a bank, hospital or government often needs. WiMAX can handle this.
An example can be helpful here. Let us say that a broadband wireless service provider chooses one particular customer premise equipment (CPE) radio that has nice features and an especially good price for its consumer based offering. These CPEs possess normal WiMAX security functionality which is at least as good as other broadband consumer technologies such as cable. It might choose to utilize a second vendor's base station to feed service to those radios that also possesses enhanced security capabilities adding an additional security overlay to the base security of the residential network consumer purposed CPE radios---particularly in the backhaul portion of the network. This could add a small layer of additional support to radios that, while secure, could not feature enhanced capabilities due to the cost factors that consumer radio business requires.
This same base unit could also offer the company an ability to support an additional layer of radios for business or governmental or health care industry customers, where health insurance privacy and portability act (HIPPA) confidentiality compliance is of great importance, that actually have a DIFFERENT CPE radio that, while more expensive, possesses feature sets that take full advantage of extended security features that are commonly added to high-security government networks. It does not detract from the network for perfectly serviceable residential class security capable (and inexpensive) radios to coexist with premium feature (and cost) WiMAX products on the same network designed to serve specialty customers. This approach is similar to add on products used with wireline products that often require additional hardware beyond the modem.
In fact, as the economies of scale for WiMAX are realized through volume manufacturing, second generation, high-security products may actually be cheaper than first generation consumer grade units granting carriers enhanced service margins for high-value services.
