Summary
WiMAX works but it will remain a niche, and large scale deployments will likely ultimately move to LTE.
Analysis
The continuing overheated story of WiMAX continued at the Yankee Group's recent "4G World" conference in Chicago. Calling today's WiMAX "4G" is more of a "4Gery" than an honest descriptor, although it is understandable that a for profit business should do whatever it takes to generate revenues, one tactic being to attract participants to conferences and to buy market reports with exaggerated advertising claims. By the way, neither will the first version of LTE truly be "4G" in terms of performance as specified in IMT-Advanced. However, the big gap in this article as is often the case is that it ignores the comparison between WiMAX and the pre-LTE HSPA/HSPA+ wireless networks, which are already widely deployed across the world and enjoy manifest substantial "time-to-market" and overwhelming "customer base" advantages over WiMAX at performance levels comparable to those of the latter. WiMAX is now a very small niche. At best it will grow to become a significant niche - for comparison it should be noted that the CDMA2000 mobile wireless technology stream that has been competing against GSM/UMTS/HSPA attained a global market share of some 15% (it has now been abandoned as major CDMA2000 operators plan to adopt LTE) after about 15 years. It is entirely conceivable, as Clearwire itself has stated, that eventually it will migrate to LTE just as earlier AT&T abandoned the U.S. TDMA IS-136 standard in favor of GSM and the CDMA2000 operators are now choosing to follow LTE, not the next generation UMB standard their group (3GPP2) was developing.
This author consults with leading institutions through GLG
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
