Anyone who’s read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass knows the Red Queen’s remark: “The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today.”

That seems to sum up the situation with WiMax and more particularly its latest incarnation, the proposed IEEE 802.16m standard. This spec is mooted as a 1Gbit/s version of WiMax, and is likely to use the multiple-input multiple- output techniques used in the 802.11n standard. Sounds great, until you remember that the 802.11n spec still hasn’t been ratified. Indeed, the whole drawn-out saga of 802.11n, plagued by vendor shenanigans since it was announced in January 2004, hardly inspires confidence.

However, there are firms out there who couldn’t care less about wireless broadband standards because they’re getting on with providing jam today for their customers. One of them is Manchester Metronet (MML).

In September, I was at the top of a block of flats in Moss Side looking out over a misty Manchester skyline with the head of MML, James McCall, who was showing me a microwave repeater.

McCall knows this business inside out and with MML he has built what could be the UK’s first wireless gigabit link operating in the 80GHz band. MML is using this 1.7km link to relay multiple video streams simultaneously.

McCall took me to a building in the city centre that contains the control room for Manchester’s CCTV network. Standing in front of the massed ranks of flat-panel monitors showing Mancunians going about their daily business, McCall asked if I could tell which screens were showing CCTV feeds carried over MML’s dedicated 6Mbit/s wireless links. I couldn’t detect any frames being dropped or interference. The screens displaying wireless CCTV looked the same as those using fibre.

The core infrastructure in MML’s system was acquired from Atlantic Telecom and is basically 13 rooftop points of presence, some with point-to-point microwave links connected with a dark fibre ring using Extreme switches. The flats I visited had a room on the roof full of UPSs, which, McCall said, could provide enough power to run MML’s network for a couple of weeks. MML offers a flat 10Mbit/s link that firms can specify to be sliced up any way they choose – xMbit/s for VoIP, xMbit/s for other critical apps – and all independent of BT.

No doubt next year we’ll have the 802.16z standard for terabit wireless over distances of 20 miles or more. It seems that all that’s needed for a standard is a word processor and a fertile imagination. In Manchester, at least, they have jam today.