ess standards designed to complement each other. (As described later in this chapter, other areas of the world follow dif- ferent standards; some follow the U.S. standards, some follow the European stan- dards, and some create proprietary standards on top of those, such as WiBro in Korea, iBurst in Australia, and TD-SCDMA in China.) Each standard is designed for a distinct market and for different usage models. These standards and others used in WMANs, WLANs, and WPANs are discussed in this chapter. WMANs Recent years have seen a growing interest in employing wireless technologies for sub- scriber access. Many companies are becoming increasingly interested in deploying wireless connectivity, often referred to as wireless local loop, covering metropolitan areas, such as cities and rural areas, as an alternative to using copper- or fiber-based approaches. As discussed earlier in this book, compared to other networking media, wireless is generally less expensive to install and support, and it can be deployed much more WMANs quickly. Until recently, the problem for wireless was a lack of standards-based solu- tions. For many years, the broadband wireless market was dominated by proprietary systems targeted at wireless backhaul and point-to-point microwave link applica- tions. There was pressure in the industry for standardization in order to increase market growth and reduce costs. In order to provide a standardized approach to wireless local loop, the IEEE 802 committee set up the 802.16 working group in 1999 to develop broadband wireless standards. The first IEEE 802.16 standard, defining the WirelessMAN air interface for wireless MANs, was published in April 2002, creating standards for broadband wireless access in order to offer a high- speed, low-cost, scalable solution to extend fiber-optic backbones. Since the intro- duction of the 802.16 standards, the WMAN arena has begun to blossom. The following sections discuss the most common WMAN standards: Broadband fixed wireless access (BFWA) IEEE 802.16 (WiMax) Wire