LTE claims its final vendor victim

The wireless infrastructure community’s biggest WiMax proponent is now officially on the fence in the 4G debate. Alvarion (NASDAQ:ALVR) announced today it would support a version of long-term evolution in its future 4G portfolio.

Alvarion is still sticking to what it knows best. Rather than compete in the larger frequency division duplexing (FDD) LTE space against established giants such as Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC), Alcatel-Lucent (NASDAQ:ALU) and Huawei, Alvarion is focusing on the time division duplexing (TDD) configuration of the technology, which is primarily targeted today at Asian markets, but has the potential to spread all over the world if unpaired spectrum license-holders opt to pursue LTE rather than WiMax. Essentially, Alvarion will be going after many of the same customers it is pursuing today — just with a different technology.

“Our primary aim is to offer tailored broadband wireless solutions which can also evolve along with customers’ needs,” said Eran Gorev, president and CEO of Alvarion, in a statement. “Our development effort over the past two years has been designed to accommodate the support for TDD-LTE as a natural extension of our existing solution.”

A WiMax Forum founder and the largest global WiMax infrastructure vendor when factoring in both fixed and mobile equipment, Alvarion has remained one of the technology’s biggest champions while vendor after vendor dropped the technology from their portfolios. Once viewed as big competitor to LTE due to its earlier standardization, WiMax has fallen off the radar for most wireless operators. With a few exceptions — the most notable being Sprint (NYSE:S) — all of the world’s established mobile operators put their weight behind the 3GPP LTE standard, fostering agreement for the first time between the warring CDMA and GSM camps. WiMax, however, was still considered a viable technology for new entrants to the wireless market, particularly those who had gotten their hands on TDD spectrum.

But that WiMax-LTE division between competitive and incumbent operators and TDD and FDD license holders soon proved artificial. Some of the original WiMax operators started going out of business. Others, like Yota, announced plans to pursue a switch to LTE. Clearwire has publicly discussed the possibility of moving to LTE in the future. And Sprint CEO Dan Hesse was quoted as entertaining the idea of a possible marriage between Sprint and T-Mobile based on the bond of LTE.

The market for WiMax gear hasn’t evaporated, but it has lost almost all of its momentum as a competitive mobile broadband technology. Most of its future growth appears to be in the fixed broadband market as a DSL alternative. The majority of Alvarion’s customers use WiMax for that kind of fixed-line substitution, and it’s likely that Alvarion’s share of that sector grows as more vendors get out of the WiMax space.

For the new TDD-LTE market, though, Alvarion faces enormous levels of competition. Not only are its competitors in mobile WiMax — primarily Motorola (NYSE:MOT), Samsung and Huawei — aiming to use their own TDD expertise to target TDD-LTE contracts, the infrastructure giants have gotten wise to the potential of that previously niche market. Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks (NYSE:NOK, NYSE:SI) and Alcatel-Lucent have all announced TDD-LTE products, and many of them have already been selected for network trials.