The upgrade cards favour LTE over WiMAX: Ericsson CTO

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 13 January 2009 14:44

Opinion and Analysis

So, who’s right? Intel has spent billions after all in making WiMAX a standard, but despite Barrett’s claims of 300-400 rollouts of WiMAX networks around the world, most of these are for the “fixed” WiMAX standard, not the mobile standard which can be used like today’s 3.5G wireless broadband cards.

WiMAX’s biggest success is in the US, Intel’s home town, and it’s interesting to see from a Forbes article that Intel’s Barrett appears to be saying that WiMAX and LTE will converge in the future with devices that play nice with both standards.

The Forbes article asks Barrett what it’s “going to take for the seamless integration of WiMAX”.

Barrett responds: “It's a build out of the towers and the capability. If WiMax starts to build out and then the long-term evolution of 3G comes along, should we look for the seamless integration of those two technologies? You probably should. We don't need another Blu-ray and HD battle in the marketplace. If we get a great fourth-generation technology, let's make it seamless and let everybody play with it and let's not have two different versions.”

In essence, it appears that Intel has spent so much to make WiMAX a reality that it is going to roll out WiMAX no matter what, but “we should look for the seamless integration of these two technologies”.

That sounds like LTE will ultimately win the 4G WiMAX wars, especially given the number of telcos who are going down the LTE path from 2009 onwards over WiMAX.

After all, as many big players in the IT space have already found, incumbent telco operators are a difficult bunch to fight – even if you’re Intel.