Ericsson SVP: 4G LTE seems to be winning over Wimax

Ericsson SVP: 4G LTE seems to be winning over Wimax

By Gary Kim

As the global wireless industry moves toward its fourth generation of technology, it isn’t too surprising that market contestants line up where their own financial interests lie. So service providers and ecosystem partners with a lot riding on GSM are backing Long Term Evolution. Other providers and their ecosystem partners are backing WiMAX for much the same reasons: direct financial interests ride on the outcome.

Still, it takes little insight to note that LTE, because it now seems firmly entrenched in the GSM world, will have some important scale advantages.

“4G LTE seems to be the winning technology,” says Dr. Hakan Eriksson, Ericsson SVP. “It is the first time the industry will get one technology worldwide.”

“WiMAX is a bit late,” Eriksson argues. While WiMAX will get to market before LTE, the established mobile providers then will move to a platform that offers much more bandwidth than WiMAX, with an ability to leverage global volumes for devices.

WiMAX supporters tend to argue that 4G builds are a ways off, as most mobile providers haven’t really gotten the value out of their 3G networks yet. WiMAX supporters also were earlier in pointing to a different notion about what applications will be run, what devices and users will be part of the base.

To the extent one can say that fixed line telephony was about voice communications to places, then mobility has been about voice communications to people. But WiMAX supporters (and growing numbers of LTE partisans as well) now say two changes are occurring.

The first change is simply that where mobility has been about connecting people, it now will be about connecting all sorts of devices other than mobile phones. 3G data cards are one example of a new market for mobile PC connections. But one can at least envision mobile-connected game players, music players or cameras.

The other change is machine-to-machine communications. Think of surveillance, monitoring and sensing networks, for example. In that case the market expands beyond people to devices, and then devices talking to other devices.

To some extent, both LTE and WiMAX supporters now increasingly would agree that new applications and “users” will be found. Both would tend to agree there are “open” and “walled garden” services for both types of network. But WiMAX supporters arguably lean towards an Internet sort of model while LTE supporters really lean towards a walled garden model. It remains to be seen whether it is a difference mostly of degree or mostly of kind.

The point is that 4G no longer really is about a technology choice. It’s about whether a vast new market can be created beyond person-to-person communications. On that score, technology ultimately won’t be decisive. Market creation will.