NetworkManager Drops WiMAX Support

With WiMAX not being too popular and other competing wireless standards taking over, NetworkManager is discontinuing its support for this technology.

Dan Winship of Red Hat had accidentally broken the NetworkManager WiMAX plug-in within his "gdbus" branch, so he decided it's time to drop the support after consulting the NetworkManager mailing list. Details of dropping WiMAX support can be found via this GNOME.org bug report created by Dan.

Today he went ahead and killed off WiMAX support in NetworkManager. The commit killing off this support reads:

Even Fedora is no longer shipping the WiMAX SDK, so it's likely we'll eventually accidentally break some of the code in src/devices/wimax/ (if we haven't already). Discussion on the list showed a consensus for dropping support for WiMAX.

So, remove the SDK checks from configure.ac, remove the WiMAX device plugin and associated manager support, and deprecate all the APIs.

For compatibility reasons, it is still possible to create and save WiMAX connections, to toggle the software WiMAX rfkill state, and to change the "WIMAX" log level, although none of these have any effect, since no NMDeviceWimax will ever be created.

nmcli was only compiling in support for most WiMAX operations when NM as a whole was built with WiMAX support, so that code has been removed now as well. (It is still possible to use nmcli to create and edit WiMAX connections, but those connections will never be activatable.)