Face-off: LTE vs. WiMAX

Now that 4G is firmly on the horizon for operators and equipment vendors the technology and marketing battles have begun. LTE and WiMAX are the two main contenders, with opinion divided as to which, if either, will win the greater market share. The two options have much in common, with similar underlying architectures and support for many of the same spectrum bands around the world.

Will there be a winner? Will LTE and WiMAX continue to compete, will one dominate, or is there scope for a combined standard? Relevant to operators, analysts and equipment and component developers, this report describes the complete 4G environment, from spectrum and standards through to operator and vendor landscapes and market size predictions. Throughout this report, LTE and WiMAX are compared, contrasted and evaluated.

The report provides a global view of LTE vs. WiMAX focusing on several key areas: Spectrum Licensing Landscape, Standards Battle, Market Size and Trends, Vendor Landscape, and Operator Landscape. For each of these areas, this report presents the relevant market developments and facts behind the deployment of LTE and WiMAX, and discusses the key factors that will impact the success of each of these technology options. Each section concludes with a ‘Face-Off’ Table that summarizes these factors, providing a score for each of these key success factors, and totaling these scores to provide an overall indication of the winner in each of the five major areas assessed.

Target Audience

• Service providers need to make choices and understand the competitive differences between LTE and WiMAX
• Everyone that needs to understand how the 4G marketplace will evolve: operators, regulators, vendors, and component suppliers
• Investment community making bets about how the broadband infrastructure and services markets will evolve

Key Report Benefits

• Broad scope of coverage including: spectrum, standards, vendors, operators, and the market.
• Comparisons and evaluations of the technology options in a number of key areas - not just descriptions and facts
• The report concludes with a ‘Final Face-Off’, in which the scores from the previous sections are added together to provide a final indicator of which of the two technology options is most likely to have a greater level of success in the market.

Sampling of Key Report Findings

• For cellular operators, LTE is the only real option, with global applicability, support for all spectrum bands and evolution from existing networks: recent regulatory changes are favoring WiMAX but these will only be beneficial to operators acquiring new spectrum
• WiMAX will remain appropriate for green-field and fixed line operators in developing markets and those dominated by new entrants: it cannot provide a sufficiently compelling business case for large scale deployments by cellular operators. WiMAX can make a business for operators and vendors, but in millions rather than billions of dollars
• With the backing from leading industry standards bodies, regulators, operators and vendors, LTE has the potential to unify and dominate the worldwide mobile broadband market. LTE’s evolution from successful, established cellular standards, together with the installed base of billions of cellular subscribers, give it a position of huge influence