Make no mistake about it, when Clearwire launched their WiMAX network in America they took a huge gamble at adopting a technology that many in the industry thought wasn’t going to go anywhere, all for the sake of wanting to label themselves as having a “4G” network. Sadly, more like inevitably really, WiMAX is beginning to lose steam. Operators are either rolling out or testing LTE networks and the bean counters at iSuppli say that in as little as 3 years there are going to be roughly 303.1 million people using LTE versus a scant 33.4 million for WiMAX. That’s practically one order of magnitude. “With WiMAX enjoying a two-to-three-year head start in next generation network deployments, it presently enjoys a major advantage in market share in the 4G segment,” said Francis Sideco, Principal Analyst for Wireless Research at iSuppli. “However, with LTE supported by most of the leading wireless operators worldwide, it will rise to surpass WiMAX in 2012 and then dominate worldwide during the following years.”
The first generation of LTE devices will be boring, mainly USB modems or highly specialized smartphones that will suffer from poor battery life and be a little bit thicker than what consumers have become accustomed to. That’s going to change by 2012 when operators begin supporting features like voice over LTE, but it’s still a long ways off. In the mean time there’s HSPA+, something iSuppli doesn’t talk about, that’s being deployed by nearly everyone in Europe, Asia, and even America with T-Mobile already offering a 21 Mbps network and promising to double that to 42 Mbps by this summer and may very well double it again to 84 Mbps just as quickly. With LTE Advanced already being shown off in South Korea and Japan, and soon becoming fully standardized, it makes more sense for operators to jump onboard the HSPA+ bandwagon and just skip LTE all together. At least that’s what I’d do.