WiMAX rattles LTE as it gains industry dominance
BARCELONA (WiMAX Day). WiMAX was in full throttle at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain this week. The WiMAX industry is growing fast, a fact that was made evident by the number of WiMAX products on display from all the major equipment vendors.
Numerous reports noted that conference delegates were surprised that WiMAX stole the limelight from Long Term Evolution (LTE), the official broadband wireless technology supported by the GSM Association, which was supposed to take center stage.
WiMAX was also prominent in a speech made by Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone. Widely regarded as a soothsayer for the telecom industry, Sarin said the two standards should not be at war.
“We should have one standard going forward, rather than dueling standards,” he said. “The old debates around TDMA, CDMA, and GSM weren’t very productive…. So we need to encourage folks to merge WiMAX into LTE.”
It was only one year ago, at the same venue, when Sarin described WiMAX as “an interesting technology that’s not really ready for prime time.” WiMAX is now the leading act in the big top, which prompted Sarin to publicly broker a merger.
But what is the common denominator that might provide for a peaceful co-existence between WiMAX and LTE? According to Rudy Leser, VP of marketing and corporate strategy at WiMAX equipment vendor Alvarion, “seventy to eighty percent of the technologies in LTE and WiMAX are the same.”
In fact, the two technologies “share a lot of the same DNA,” explained Hyam Bolande, Global Director in solutions marketing at Alcatel-Lucent’s Mobile Access Division.
The bulk of this DNA is known as Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), which is the key component that the ITU Radiocommunication Assembly baked into the IMT standard for 4G. OFDMA is the access scheme employed by WiMAX. It is said to be a “working assumption” that OFDMA