14 DAY TRIAL // When it comes to the market of 4G services, there are two technologies that will compete for supremacy, namely LTE (Long Term Evolution) and WiMAX, and a recent report from ABI Research shows that the deployment of the two will go head to head. LTE is just starting to pick up pace, while the roll-out of WiMAX will continue in steady progress.
“While LTE does promise data speeds greater than 50Mbps, they have yet to be achieved by live or trial networks, whereas mobile WiMAX is now a tried and tested standard,” ABI Research analyst Bhavya Khanna stated. There are already a series of carriers which chose WiMAX for 4G deployments, including Sprint in the United States, and ABI Research notes that 164 mobile WiMAX networks were in trial or commercial operation at the end of 2009, compared to only about 100 LTE trials.
However, the first LTE-based network in the world was already deployed on the market by TeliaSonera in Stockholm and Oslo, and 2010 is expected to see the launch of more LTE networks, including one from Verizon Wireless in the United States, or another from NTT DoCoMo in Japan. However, the compatible handsets still lack at the moment, and the voice standards are still in development, which means that these networks will only carry data traffic for a period.
According to ABI Research, we should also take into consideration the fact that there are 242 network contract announcements for mobile WiMAX, while only 38 were announced for LTE. And since there are also a series of WiMAX devices slated for a 2010 launch, including possible handsets from HTC, the technology is expected to co-exist with LTE for some time, the research firm also notes. Additional details on the new report from ABI Research, dubbed “Wireless Spectrum, Services and Technology Deployment Market Data,” are available on the company's website.