The answer, per usual, is 'it depends'
OK, so I was the only holdout on a trends-oriented wireless panel discussion at Interop this week when we got around to the prospects for WiMAX’s future (or lack thereof).
Fellow panelists Sue Marek of FierceWireless, Philippe Winthrop of the Enterprise Mobility Forum and Bob Egan of The Seraphim Group, along with moderator Craig Mathias of Farpoint Group, delivered a grim prognosis for WiMAX’s survivability. Actually, that’s a euphemism: They said “WiMAX is dead.”
All these folks are sharp cookies, and they had good reasons, citing the major U.S. carriers’ fervor to build out LTE networks and Sprint and Clearwire’s public waffling about their commitment to WiMAX going forward.
TECH ARGUMENT: LTE vs. WiMAX
I was the one dissenter on the panel, and my reasons are part based in reality and part based in denial and hope.
First, the reality part.
WiMAX networks already cover 150 countries and nearly a billion people (or will by the end of the year; they touch more than 800 million today). Who cares what the broadband mobile technology behind the curtain is as long as it delivers on user expectations?
It’s also possible to have devices support multiple radios and, with the FCC’s recent mandate for carriers to institute data roaming capabilities, it shouldn’t matter what network you’re on, so long as your device can work with it.
Also, WiMAX is the one “4G” (in quotes because that’s a marketing term in this context) network that’s already out there and widespread. Why not use it?
And who among the up-and-coming work force of 20-somethings care how it works, as long as it does? In North America, it’s true that success of WiMAX (the mobile version, anyway) hinges greatly on what Sprint and Clearwire do. I’d like to see them partner with smaller operators who need more clout and economies of scale, perhaps in the form of an alliance of WiMAX operators that could take on the AT&T-T-Mobile GSM monopoly, should it occur, and the AT&T-Verizon Wireless duopoly in either case.
Many of these smaller carriers already use fixed WiMAX as a last-mile alternative to DSL and cable modem offerings. And 802.16m, a forthcoming generation of WiMAX, was approved last year as a formal 4G standard by the 3GPP. LTE-Advanced is the other.
And in-building distributed access systems (DAS) for bringing 3G/4G networks indoors already support WiMAX but not LTE yet.
We’re in an industry that wants black-and-white answers to winners and losers when there are often many winners. Malcolm Gladwell, a New Yorker columnist who describes why there are myriads types of mustard on the market today but only one kind of ketchup in his book “What the Dog Saw,” demonstrates that there’s really room for lots of competitors in some areas but not others and that it takes quite a bit of searching under the covers to figure out why.
WiMAX has been in development for so long, with so many iterations, with so many billions spent on it, that it just can’t bite the dust. It just can’t.
