By Tara Seals

When it comes to 4G mobile broadband, WiMAX has a time-to-market advantage, but LTE has the support of most major wireless operators. Which will win the 4G shooting match? Which has the potential to be more disruptive?

It turns out, these are not the questions to ask.

“Though 4G might be disruptive, perhaps the better question is, what is it disruptive to?” said Martin Suter, vice president of business development at service provider Wi-Fi specialist BelAir Networks. “There are ramifications for some of the other things that are going on in the industry, like net neutrality challenging the status quo. Those are some doors being broken down as a function of the mobile Internet.”

“Neither technology’s disruptive in and of itself, but the services it enables are,” said Fred Kemmerer, CTO for GENBAND. Video and content are happening right now and carriers need to deliver bandwidth efficiently. They need technologies like DPI and femtocells in order to make the business case work.”

As for which is more likely to be viable, on the surface it looks like there is indeed a smackdown of sorts happening. Suter said that out of 86 percent of mobile operators supporting GSM today, 0 percent of them will shift to WiMAX. Meanwhile, 100 percent of incumbents will end up with LTE, plus some CDMA operators like Verizon Wireless. Problems that WiMAX has as a technology, Suter added, is the fact that it’s revolutionary, not evolutionary technology, better suited for new builds. Meanwhile there’s a clear upgrade path for LTE. And, there’s no killer device, and there’s a lack of roaming to consider.

“But does this mean WiMAX is dead?” asked Suter. “I would suggest probably not.”

In the United States, Clearwire Corp. is the poster child for WiMAX, but recently the CEO has been hedging a bit, saying it would switch to LTE if warranted. But there are also 18 other WISPs across the country deploying WiMAX; plenty of the broadband stimulus might be leveraged by WiMAX operators, especially for M2M and smart grid applications. And according to the WiMAX Forum, there are a full 455 networks worldwide (including 15 in Finland).

“I think both will find a place in the market, just different markets,” said Kemmerer. “It’s more about market factors as to how the market develops.”

“When we look at the market for fixed-line equivalent deployments, WiMAX is clearly a market leader already,” Kemmerer said. “Because it’s a little further along in terms of being a deployable technology, it is very quick to roll out. Vendors are concentrating on developing fixed-line replacement gear, so WiMAX will continue to do well in emerging markets.”

WiMAX, he noted, works on simple structures; as a new technology there’s no core technology with which they have to be backward-compatible. 

David LeClaire, regional vice president of sales at softswitch vendor Taqua, noted that device manufacturers will write what makes sense for the majority, and that would be LTE.

But regardless, he noted, it’s time the market be realistic. It‘s simply too early to handicap whether either WiMAX or LTE will dominate the 4G landscape. What carriers should be doing is learning from the 4G experience. “This is a mobile evolution, not revolution,“ LeClaire said. “What can we learn from the 3G uptake? One, it will take longer than we can imagine, and right now we’re just at the front end of the hype curve. There are still clearly investments being made in 3G, but carriers are leveraging the experience. The learning of service ubiquity is key. Operators are learning a lot from what’s happening in 3G when it comes to bandwidth congestion. Also, the power of open application tool sets and allowing the community to develop these applications is clear. 3G started out as a much more vertical closed industry, and look what happened.”

Of course what happened was that operators are left with a huge quandary: They need to drive revenue and data consumption up, but they’re not achieving enough of the value they need from that to monetize the investment in the network to enable that.

“There’s a decoupling of revenue from data traffic,” explained Suter. “The average iPhone user uses 30 times the data of a regular user – but he or she is not paying four times more. They have to fix that."

In short, it’s not about LTE vs.WiMAX. It’s about learning the lessons from 3G when it comes to wireless data, keeping an eye out for logistical disruptions and ultimately deploying the technology that makes the most sense for any given operator given spectrum position and market segment.

“While it seems like LTE will dominate, there is a case for WiMAX for some operators,” said Suter. “They’ll coexist.”