LTE Deployments
The Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) has just published an update of the status of and plans for LTE, which include 34 commitments from network operators. The list shown in the accompanying table includes the commitments in Sweden and Norway that involve the 2.6GHz band, as well as many more other commitments in diverse bands such as “digital dividend” (700 MHz) and AWS (1.7/2.1GHz) in the U.S., and 800MHz and 1.5GHz in Japan among others. The list does not include the LTE plans also announced by Chunghwa in Taiwan or the spectrum that was recently awarded to deploy LTE at 1800MHz in Finland.
I have not researched detailed subscriber numbers, but it is quite likely that the operators included in this Table account today for over 1 billion mobile customers. It will take several years for these deployments to cover the majority of customers within the areas served by these operators.
There remain significant uncertainties about the speed with which issues such as LTE chipset and hence terminal availability, enhancement of the LTE standard towards true “4G” capability, interoperability between LTE and 3G technologies, and the delivery of voice over LTE networks are resolved and the inevitable operational kinks worked out.
Nevertheless it does appear that any window for mobile WiMAX beyond its application as a fixed DSL alternative and/or to become more than a niche fill-in in mobile markets has for all practical purposes vanished.
In its currently available implementations mobile WiMAX is unable to offer a decisive performance advantage over existing widely deployed HSPA networks. By the time additional spectrum is made available in most countries for broadband wireless deployments the already visible momentum behind LTE will be irresistible. No longer will it be even superficially plausible to make the claim that mobile WiMAX is unique.
Network equipment and terminal device vendors and wireless chipset suppliers trying to allocate finite development resources are inevitably being driven to pursue LTE-related opportunities rather than mobile WiMAX.
Interestingly declining interest in mobile WIMAX is also enhancing the prospects for a few smaller suppliers, notably Alvarion, which can aspire to leadership in a niche large enough to support significant growth on their scale. Alvarion benefits as their competitors either fall by the wayside (such as Telsima) or choose to resell WiMAX (such as NSN) for the sake of maintaining a very broad product portfolio, rather than continue the development of their own WiMAX products.
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