WiMax In 2010 — Too Little, Too Late?

CWmike writes "By the end of 2010, users in more than 80 US cities may be able to ditch their cable modems, T1 setups and DSL lines — and the Wi-Fi routers that go with them — in favor of WiMax wireless technology. Wait, haven't we heard that before? WiMax has been promised 'any day now' for years, but WiMax vendors such as Clearwire Communications LLC have suffered numerous delays in rolling out services. A recent ramp-up in Clearwire deployments bodes well for WiMax, but it may not have the chance to fully get off the ground before a competing technology called Long-Term Evolution (LTE) does it in. Craig Mathias, principal analyst at Farpoint Group and a Computerworld columnist, sees WiMax taking a minority stake in the wireless broadband future. 'LTE will eventually be a combined broadband voice/data solution that can do everything that WiMax can and more,' he said. Mathias believes that LTE could get up to 80% of the global market share in future cellular installations. 'This leaves WiMax with a potential market share that cannot exceed 20% — but that's still a huge number, assuming 4 billion users around 2020 or so," he said. 'You do the math. The opportunity is nothing to sneeze at.'"

Comments

Re:This is a non issue

[dantino]

It's true that the underlying technologies behind LTE and WiMax are nearly identical. However, the telecommunications sector has shown over and over that politics/regulation play a more important role than technology. The main advantage brought forward by WiMax is that it is designed as a full IP solutions. Providers only sell the bandwidth (much like DSL), which is of interest to the final consumer since he make use of any internet application (voip, video conference, gaming, ..). This goes much against the traditional business model of mobile operator in the US. So, even if LTE, make it by 2010 (which I hugely doubt). It will likely be tied to an overpriced features business model (sms, voicemail, called id, etc)