Monday, December 08, 2008

WiMax versus LTE


In the battle for mobile wireless broadband, it looks like we will have to battling camps. Sprint/Clearwire with WiMax and Qualcomm putting their eggs in the Third Generation Partnership Project Long Term Evolution (3GPP LTE) basket. EETimes.com - Qualcomm outlines aggressive plans for LTE chips
Wireless chip group Qualcomm Inc. has laid out an aggressive roadmap for readying engineering samples of its initial devices for the Long Term Evolution upgrade to W-CDMA 3G technology, and expects to be sampling selected customers by the second quarter of next year.

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Qualcomm's view [sic] is that operators will, at least initially, address high data traffic urban areas with LTE implementations that will work in tandem with HSPA and HSPA+ enabled networks in rural areas.

Qualcomm was one of the late converts to LTE technology and for long promoted its own Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB) specification for next generation mobile broadband. But the company recently revealed it had abandoned development of UMB and has also raised concerns over the other 4G alternative mobile WiMAX.

As to mobile WiMAX, he [senior VP
Enrico Salvatori] suggested this will not deliver the same performance as LTE, has some major drawbacks when it comes to spectrum efficiency, and the volumes and economies of scale will not be as favorable as is likely to be from Long Term Evolution technology.

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