14 DAY TRIAL // The WiMAX mobile communication technology is finally ready to go from the lab to the field testing phase and this fact makes all major telecommunication companies face a few important decisions that they should undertake concerning their 4G strategies.
According to the news site digitimes, the research firm ABI Research expects that the first WiMAX real world deployments would convince the major players in that field to more readily adopt the new standard. It is said that most mobile communication operators are expected to sooner or later field WiMAX technologies and networks all over the world, mainly using the 2.5GHz and the 3.5GHz frequencies.
"The mobile wireless industry is in a state of major change as mobile operators decide which IP-OFDMA path they will take for their 4G networks," says ABI Research principal mobile broadband analyst Philip Solis. "The new and unproven (on a large commercial scale) mobile WiMAX has positioned itself against the potential Goliath that LTE (Long Term Evolution) is expected to become."
It is hoped that the number of users interested in the new mobile communication technology will grow very much once the first WiMAX networks are in place and operational, reaching more than 95 million by 2012 for the ones that are employing CPE devices and nearly 200 million for the ones using mobile appliances.
As the global trend is to drop the wired networking connections and move toward a completely wireless networking technology, more and more computer hardware manufacturing companies are repositioning themselves in order to make the most of this relatively new course. As wireless technologies are becoming more and more popular and widely used, besides mobile computing devices like laptops and notebooks, a number of other computing devices like UMPCs and consumer electronics are reaching for the wireless connectivity features, boosting the hardware producers' interest in that area, and so the interest in the WiMAX standard.