Over the past year or so, cell phone carriers in the U.S. have been divided on which platform to launch fourth-generation services. Well, divided in that the two largest carriers in the nation will be looking to LTE, while the No. 3 carrier, Sprint, is barking up the WiMax tree. It would appear the deck is stacked in favor of LTE, but according to a recent In-Stat study, WiMax will outpace LTE at the beginning thanks to its head start. The question, though, is of whether WiMax can continue to stay ahead of the game, despite two companies with over 150 million combined subscribers trying to shift the trend elsewhere.
WiMax does have significant backing. Clearwire’s nationwide WiMax project is backed not only by Sprint, but by Google, Intel, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast. So there is an interest to see this succeed. Perhaps it’s in an effort to curb the growth of the top two carriers. Time Warner and Comcast would certainly have interest in that, since both Verizon and AT&T now deal with cable TV and Internet services.
“Most of the operators looking to deploy WiMax come to it from the fixed network space,” Daryl Schoolar, an In-Stat analyst, said in a statement. “These operators are looking to use WiMax as an enhanced DSL service. Most of the early operators supporting LTE come from the mobile space. These operators want to use LTE to increase capacity and peak rates on their existing mobile networks.”
The thing I love about WiMax is that it can do so much, and we have so much planned for it: replacement for DSL, 4G mobile voice and data services, wireless Internet. LTE can do most of these things, of course — it’s just that I don’t trust the handling of the network in the hands of Verizon and AT&T.
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