4.2 WiMAX Development Prospect in America

United States

The development of WiMAX in the US is more critical. The prospect of WiMAX in US is not clear and obvious because some activities of code companies in 2008.

Actually, before 2008, a lot of organizations in US had confidence to focus on WiMAX service, commercial WiMAX service already available in US. But in 2008, the situation change suddenly, now in the competition of 4G broadband wireless, WiMAX is not anymore the best solution for many industries while the last year, a lot of companies seem WiMAX as the most promising standard in the future, including Intel, Nokia, Samsung and Sprint Nextel, etc. They even aimed at increasing the speed of network and decresing down the price. What they considered was that WiMAX is a standardized wireless technology with low cost so that they were possible to integral it into meda player, car, handset and other equipments. However, things always change fast, the future of WiMAX has to be worried about. Sprint Nextel and Clearwire broke away with each other and LTE (Long Term Evolution) comes up and will be support by many big companies. Then many people think WiMAX is not a mature standard and will be replaced by LTE. From the news, we can also look at that Nortel Networks will reduce the investment on WiMAX and change its way to concentrate on developing LTE. The benefit is that because of Verizon support LTE, so that North Network received a mass of order from Verizon which made it profitable. Besides, AT&T and other operators in Europe also chose LTE technology. They recognized that LTE will be with low rist compare with WiMAX as 4G technique. Moreover, there is news about that Intel may quit WiMAX and accept LTE. This news shocked a lot of experts who are supporting WiMAX. But this indicates that LTE will become the biggest competitor in next generation technoloy in US.

Neverthe less, the prospect of WiMAX is not as bad as we see. Actually, TDS Telecom started data and voices service in Madison even its broadband setup is fixed. Sprint Nextel made employee service in company area in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington and they were also preparing for the future business. The important company Clearwire may have there WiMAX service formally in the late of 2008, they already started their preparation on network trial in Portland. More and more customer selected WiMAX as their home network service instead of others. It makes sense because technologically, WiMAX has its own advantages as I mentioned in previous sections, especially with the high speed and low cost, and advanced application support. But there is still have one thing we need to consider is the low cost advantage of WiMAX. The cost depends on the price of chips while the price of chips are always unstable. As the not very mature market for WiMAX, so the future cost of it is still unclear. So that how to keep the low price of WiMAX is the considerable problem. In US, a few anti-WiMAX people think that WiMAX is just a temporary technology. The main reason they have this opinion maybe because Verizon uses LTE for 4G service instead of CDMA2000, as we know, LTE is the in the approach of GSM network. Actually, Qualcomm also have its LTE chips. WiMAX may be frustrated about Verizon's policy but its not difficult to understand why they choose LTE because Verizon has close contact with Vodafone in Europe.

So in the US, WiMAX's future is not clear by now, and there is still a long way to go because of the main competitor LTE. Sprint, Nextel and Clearwire will play an important role during the development of WiMAX in North America. Without doubt, the challenge is also the opportunity for WiMAX.

South America

In south America, this situation is a bit different. Alvarison is the main company in this region who support the development of WiMAX. In Brazil, Agentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, a big WiMAX network is establishing and the users coverage is much larger than that in US and Europe. The forecast is that customers of WiMAX will keep increasing in the future, it's extremly better than North America. But in my opinion, what I worry about is that the market of WiMAX may be affected by the situation of North America. If WiMAX fail in US, then it will be indeed a negative effec to its development in Latin America.