Disadvantages of WiMAX

Bandwidth Shared Among Users:
WiMAX’s drawback is that it distributes the bandwidth among users. This means, you will experience slow down when there are more uses in the base.

Power Intensive Technology
WiMAX is very power intensive technology and requires strong electrical support.

Limited Date Rate:
When compared to other modes of broadband connectivity, for example, fibre optic cables and satellite internet, WiMAX is still slow.

Speed Decrease over Large Distance:
Because of bit rate errors happening at large distance, WiMAX system is forced to use lower bit rates at these distances. This means less data transfer rate.

Rain can affect Connectivity:
As fixed WiMAX requires line-of-sight radio link, heavy rain can disrupt the entire link.

Like most wireless systems, available bandwidth is shared between users in a given radio sector, so performance could deteriorate in the case of many active users in a single sector. In practice, many users will have a range of 2-, 4-, 6-, 8-, 10- or 12 Mbit/s services and additional radio cards will be added to the base station to increase the capacity as required.

Because of this, various granular and distributed network architectures are being incorporated into WiMAX through independent development and within the IEEE 802.16j mobile multi-hop relay (MMR) task group. This includes wireless mesh, grids, network remote station repeaters which can extend networks and connect to backhaul.

If there are many users in one sector, they will have lower speed. If users are moving, speed can drop significantly. In the urban environment (without the optical visibility) users can have 10 Mbps at 2 kilometers.