Sprint’s director of global development, Teresa Kellett at WiMAX forum Asia compared the two upcoming 4G standards LTE and WiMAX. Sprint’s representative basically said that WiMAX would succeed because it’s here first and technical capabilities of LTE won’t count for much. She compared LTE and WiMAX to GSM and CDMA, suggesting that GSM ruled the mobile market by virtue of being first to the market. Intel’s Garth Collier, managing director of Intel’s WiMAX division in Asia-Pacific and Japan suggested that WiMAX and LTE could co-exist. He said that he was seeing for the first time a convergence in the cellular industry. We all know that Sprint is backing WiMAX and has already started WiMAX deployment. But the truth is most of the carriers around the world are going for LTE. Sprint is the third largest carrier in US, the two biggest carriers AT&T and Verizon are both supporting LTE. Consider that the market share ratio remains unchanged, then in US WiMAX will have one customer for every 5 customers LTE based service will get. The story will be same in Europe also as most of the European carriers are planning to support LTE by 2009. WiMAX is a good technology for long distance wireless Internet coverage but for Voice LTE superior. If you just consider speed LTE can deliver 100Mbps compared to around 10Mbps by WiMAX making it better for Internet also. Garth Freeman, CEO of the Buzz Broadband, the first WiMAX provider in Australia described an inability to get a signal inside a structure just 400 meters from the base station, and latency up to 1000 milliseconds making the service unusable for VoIP let alone voice calls. I think in its present incarnation WiMAX might become CDMA of the future but definitely not GSM of the future.
[Via Phonemag]