WiMAX Trends

Speculation that Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) will defocus on the WiMAX market has gained new weight, with Sprint Nextel defecting to Samsung to supply the Dallas-Fort Worth build-out for its Xohm service. The operator insists this is just a practicality, because the Texas city became ready for its equipment...

Intel and the WiMAX community may stick to their party line that WiMAX will complement cellular networks rather than challenge them, but the chief 802.16e flagwaver continually highlights areas where it claims its favorite platform can beat HSPA and even LTE hands-down. These are increasingly not directly about technology...

WiMAX presents the first opportunity to extend a full-featured Internet experience at broadband speeds to the mobile economy. WiMAX delivers benefits--lower cost per megabyte; standards-based network design; and low-cost, small-scale chip sets--that promise a ubiquitous mobile broadband experience on a myriad of portable electronic devices. Capitalizing on this technology...

In some ways, Sprint Nextel's early embrace of Mobile WiMAX has done the 802.16 cause harm as well as good. It has subverted the marketing agenda almost entirely towards wide area mobile broadband and established carriers, taking the spotlight off the markets where the prospects for WiMAX are far...

Sprint Nextel will gain many advantages from spinning off its Xohm WiMAX unit - shared cost and risk with Clearwire, additional spectrum hoards and so on. But there are some downsides to the loss of full control too, and one of them is highlighted by the initial device roll-out...

Despite regulatory delays and political debates over auction rules, India is still the most promising major market for WiMAX and now the technology's greatest cheerleader and financial backer, Intel, is taking steps to ensure this potential is realized. The chipmaker has often lent its financial clout to the WiMAX...

Sprint and Clearwire may grab most of the US WiMAX headlines, but there is growing uptake of the technology among smaller operators using the new lightly licensed 3.65GHz band, and this may support a more attractive business model than the last system for delivering disruptive open wireless services, metro...

Broadband use in Latin America is one of the lowest in the world. According to Yankee Group's Latin America Consumer Market Adoption Monitor & Forecast, only 3.3% of the general Latin American population has a broadband connection. This lack of connectivity is drawing more attention from governments, non-governmental organizations...

It has always been highly likely that Sprint and Clearwire would return to the altar after breaking off their engagement last fall. It now that seems set to happen sooner rather than later, as Sprint’s new CEO Dan Hesse looks for quick action to revive some confidence in his...

There is little doubt that the prospect of Mobile WiMAX providing an alternative mobile broadband platform to those of the 3GPP and 3GPP2 has accelerated the competitive development of LTE. LTE and Mobile WiMAX may be technologically quite similar, indeed many vendors support both platforms, but there remain deep-seated...