All of the chatter about  4G wireless in the big tech media is really beginning to annoy me.  The wireless broadband world as of right now is 100% Wimax, and it works. In fact this post comes to you tonight via a Wimax connection that outperforms AT&T’s best DSL offering in my neighborhood, and lags behind Time Warner’s pricey 15MBPS service a bit. So, 4G wireless is here, working and destined to improve.  Today it is 100% Wimax. You’d never know that from reading posts in the big tech media. They keep telling us that something called LTE is what I’ve been waiting for. Well, excuse me, I’m not waiting, I’m using. So why is it we keep reading FUD like this in GigaOM? I think it’s pretty simple. Lots of bloggers are following the lame stream media and recycling press releases and talking points as news. Sorry to single you out Om, I really do like your blog and you’re far from  the worst offender.

Let me spell my bias out for you, and I think it’s pretty much the same as the average broadband consumer. IF an LTE based carrier  shows up with a better deal I’m a customer. But, that’s based on if and when. Today, I’m writing about what I can buy now.

I do wish we’d get past discussion of technology. It’s a no brainer that LTE has a commitment from the major cell phone operators. It’s also a fact no one really has a clear idea of what LTE will be beyond the results of preliminary lab stats. The idea behind LTE is to make an easy transition form current cell phone technology for the nickel and dime you to death cellular carriers. Wimax was never designed to do that. So far, Wimax has been deployed as a big open pipe. Try getting that from the cell phone guys. By the time LTE is expected to be available in major markets, next gen Wimax will be available and an upgrade. I see a coming 4G war not only between two technologies, but also between two business models.

Bottom line: I can promise you we’re getting no largess from either the LTE or Wimax camp. We’re based in Texas, so I’ll use a little local analogy. Today Wimax is the only horse in town, and it’s pricier than we would like and slower than we would like. At the same time, as of today, the LTE camp is all hat and no cattle. Contrary to all of the tech media propaganda, both are likely to be with us for some time to come. In fact, I doubt one will be an clear winner over the other. There’s plenty of evidence for how that could work in today’s two competing cell phone standards.

It’s extremely irresponsible to call one a clear winner over the other before both players even take the field, and we’re not going to do that.

With the Clearwire consortium accelerating new launches in several major cities this year, 4G wireless has arrived. Verizon is sending signals that it will compete in this space with its own 4G offering sooner rather than later.

Verizon Wireless, the largest US mobile carrier, has just announced that it has successfully completed LTE (4G) data calls in Boston and Seattle – which currently have 10 functional LTE cell sites each.

Based on the 3GPP Release 8 standard, the data calls were made over Verizon’s 700 MHz spectrum, and involved file downloads/uploads, streaming video, Web browsing, and voice transmissions using VoIP.

Will two players be enough to create a competitive market? Probably not in wireless alone. But Clearwire intends to take market share from fixed line providers as well as 3G. Don’t expect Verizon to join in that attack until it’s fiber fixed line service has much broader coverage.  With the current pace of deployment, that time will not come soon.

With Nortel’s ongoing financial woes it follows that they would start trimming nonyielding products/services. Sadly one of them has been their WiMax product line. –

Fallout from Nortel Network Corp.’s financial troubles has forced the Canadian giant to end its mobile WiMAX business and sever its ties with Alvarion Ltd.

Nortel officials said Thursday the decision allows the company to narrow its focus, manage investments and strengthen its long-term competitiveness in its carrier business by dropping out of the 4G technology that is being heavily backed by Alvarion.

This poses a problem for WiMax. Cisco from what I see in the industry seems to have a preference for LTE. Not that I am saying the would not sell WiMax. But their ties to the telcos fosters a follow the money attitude.

Linky.

Verizon, who has been working overtime to FUD WiMAX via the new Clearwire out of existence, seems to be a believer in the technology after  all. No, they are not adopting the technology for their own 4G use, but they have stated that their LTE service will appear magically out of thin air next year. If you’re Verizon, the best reason to claim you’ll have alledgedly better product to market quickly is to slow the take rate of your competitors offering. Naturally we will be here to document that miracle as it unfolds before our eyes, so stay tuned.

“We expect that LTE will actually be in service somewhere here in the U.S. probably this time next year,” said Dick Lynch, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Verizon Communications, in a speech at Cisco Systems‘ C-Scape conference in San Jose, California. That would represent a more aggressive timetable than many observers have expected for the high-speed data system, which has been pegged for initial deployments in 2010 and wide rollouts starting in 2011.

LTE is a fourth-generation wireless data system expected to be the next step up in speed and capacity for carriers using the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) platform, which is dominant in most of the world. Like WiMax, it should deliver multiple megabits per second of throughput. (Yahoo)

It’s amazing how much of the tech press and big tech blogs have run this story as the certain death of WiMAX. It’s true that Spint/Clearwire has had a bunch of trouble getting their network off of the ground, but they have and it’s working. There is still a big bunch of deploying ahead to build a national network. The rub with reporting Verizon’s LTE as a sure fire Clear wire killer is that Verizon has just as many obstacles ahead as Clearwire, and maybe a few more. The biggest unresolved issue is backhaul. It’s the main factor in slowing Clearwire’s progress, and Verizon has no bigger existing pipes to their towers. In fact the big V has struggled for years just to get much lower speed 3G service working. Then there is the underlying technology. WiMAX has had plenty of hiccups along the way to becoming a reality, but it is now in the wild and working as advertised. LTE is still in its infancy without a single working installation, and it’s silly to assume it will work perfectly in its first few generations. Then there’s the capital involved in getting a network built. Verizon is not likely to be able to raise as much money in the debt market as they have been able to in the past - no one is right now.

I’m not a WiMAX cheerleader per se. I hope both Wimax and LTE are up an running ASAP, and competing vigorously. What makes Clearwire’s WiMAX appealing today is its time to market, and it’s direct competitive stance against both mobile and fixed broadband. I’ll offer a crazed cheer to any company that will offer a potential third pipe, even one that’s only 2-4 MBPS. So if Verizon or LTE wants me to cheer, the can buy a big ad on Thirdpipe (like they do on the blogs that spread their FUD), or show me the bandwidth and actually deliver a working product before they ask me to declare a competitor “dead”.

If you are one of our nations best and brightest, you could study engineering and contribute value to our society in your creations. You could also become an attorney and defend the property of the engineer from those who willfully steal the innovations. Either of these could reward years of hard work with great wealth and recognition. A third course is to invent nothing, defend nothing tangible and take advantage of an outdated patent system by running an intellectual property protection racket. Unfortunately the third course has proven to be a quick path to easy money, creating a growth industry that is nothing more than a hungry parasite.

While the new wave of LTE lawsuits couldn’t have happened to a more deserving group of companies, the lawsuits are probably no more valid than the suits that have harassed WiFi and WiMAX. Congress should  reform the patent act and discourage baseless litigation. Unfortunately, the political party of the trial lawyer is poised to take control of our government for at least the next two years.  Seems we’ll be seeing more of this instead of less.

Name the standard, and we can probably find someone claiming patents on it. There are still ongoing patent battles surrounding both WiFi and WiMax. The latest is apparently surrounding LTE, the choice of many mobile providers for their 4G next generation wireless. A company named ADC is claiming that LTE violates its patents and is now asking for royalties.  (Techdirt)

First, I want to be very clear that I expect AT&T and Verizon to do a bunch of business with LTE. For the record, I’m also no fan of Sprint. I am a former cellular customer of all three and am in no hurry to do more business with any of them.

We keep seeing results of study after study first trying to marginalize WiMax until the technology was firmly established as a quickly deployable, scalable, and reliable competitor in the symmetric bandwidth business class arena. Mobile WiMAX is now getting its fair share of FUD, mostly because you’ll be able to subscribe to it in most major US cities before the LTE spec will even be finalized. I’ll even grant that this does not give mobile WiMAX a great advantage.

Some people argue that because Mobile WiMax is hitting the market sooner than LTE (which we discussed this morning), it has the potential to cement itself as the next-gen wireless broadband flavor of choice. Not so much, says a new study by IMS Research, which declares that the technology will struggle to gain traction with operators, and will ultimately remain a “niche mobile technology.” That’s a slight variation from the half-decade worth of mobile hype (largely coming from Intel) that heralded WiMax’s arrival.  (DSL Reports)

The latest FUD is all about incompatibility with what AT&T and Verizon will offer some day in the future? Sure they have most of the cellular market share. They also have a subscription based business model, with nickel and dime adds ons and all sorts of metering and limits. It’s almost certain they will roll out LTE based mobile broadband using these same business models that consumers hate. Assuming the open standard Sprint has established for mobile WiMAX is the business model for those offering service using that technology, who in their right mind would take closed and cumbersome LTE service instead? Would they buy just because Darth V and the Death star had chosen it?

I could be wrong, but I think business model will determine who wins, and the technology delivering the service is secondary. Most consumers will chose the biggest, most open pipe they can get for their money, and none will care what standard enables it or who is selling it. Until the big telcos open their networks, I’ll declare WiMAX the clear front runner.