Mobile WiMax in challenge?

A report, conducted by Arthur D. Little, being published by GSM Association and claimed to shred the business case of mobile WiMax in markets where 3G is already in service. Ericsson, as the WiMax opponent, reckons HSPA will have 20 times as many subscribers as mobile WiMax by 2011. At that time the HSPA is predicted to be used by nearly 600 million users, while mobile WiMax will only gain 20 million subscribers.

Although Vodafone as one of the largest mobile operator in the world has recently joined WiMax Forum, other operators tend to wait and see especially regarding the economical value and reliability of this new technology. Australian based Telstra snubbed the technology by saying that mobile WiMax is “unproven” and “fastly inferior” to its current HSDPA service.

As a strike back, 3G vendors led by Ericsson initiates new standard called Long-Term Evolution (LTE) as the development of 3G technology in promising to rival WiMax speed. These LTE modules will fit with existing 3G base stations and planned to be first deployed in late 2009. They claimed this solution will be cheaper than moving to new WiMax technology.

More than 100 operators in 63 countries around the world have successfully implemented HSDPA technology. This is a major advantage over mobile WiMax in economic scale. Mobile WiMax need to match to as little as 15 euros ($20) of HSDPA service per user per month.

Telecom Magazine via 3G4G