Summary
The belief that LTE can come ahead of its original schedule is a wishful thinking. The industry has not seen any corner cutting in any of its emerging standards. Even ISDN followed by the TDMA-CDMA-GSM standard wars took their time to be established as working standard. WiMAX itself is under development and experimental usage for more than four years before we can expect its real launch in 2009.
Analysis
Bringing communication standard from draft to mass usage is a long hurdle spotted process. WiMAX itself can serve as a very good example of how much sufferings you have to pass from a draft idea to deployment. Even if your experiments and trials are OK, then you must await a change in the standard that will hold you for one year.
LTE cannot skip this process since so much has been invested in WiMAX including closed IEEE standards, combining it in cellular, chipset development and system integration.
It will be an illusion to think that a recently developed standard or technology can skip over the basic milestones of converting an idea into reality. Considering the giants like Intel and Sprint who has invested so much efforts along with Alvarion and other system integrators, it seems to be that LTE will have to wait until its turn comes.
Since no war WiMAX/LTE is the wish of anyone, we can expect a serial event rather than parallel launch or bypassing WiMAX by LTE.
Therefore, conclusion is that LTE has to queue up before it can be really adopted as WiMAX next generation.
