Verizon accelerating LTE, putting further pressure on Clearwire, WiMAX

The fact that Verizon is pushing its planned launch date forward rather than back—even if only incrementally—may be indicative of a new urgency surrounding 4G. At an LTE summit in London last month, T-Mobile International executives said that the multi-country operator planned to skip Evolved HSPA, even though its competitors are pursuing the 3G upgrade, and aggressively pursue LTE. NTT DoCoMo has said it would launch the technology commercially in 2010. Both Verizon and DoCoMo face potential competition from large WiMAX competitors in their backyards—in DoCoMo’s case, UQ Communications. But operators like T-Mobile and China Unicom are also fast-tracking LTE despite no immediate threat from a large WiMAX operator.

GSM Association Director of Technology Dan Warren said some operators are taking an urgent approach to 3G, while others are sitting back to see where the market goes, and the reasons for their decisions are myriad. Verizon’s existing roadmap ends with EV-DO revision B, which gives it extra incentive to pursue 4G today, Warren said. China Mobile is deploying China’s unique brand of 3G, Time Division-Synchronous CDMA (TD-SCDMA), which isolates it from the rest of the global 3G community, thus giving it the impetus to deploy a globally standardized data technology, Warren said. Meanwhile many UMTS operators still haven’t exhausted all of the possible upgrades for their high-speed packet access (HSPA) networks. But even UMTS operators are in different camps, Warren said: Some due to the age of their networks can deploy Evolved HSPA more easily, some have new spectrum they could use for LTE more readily available, while some are just far more cautious than others.

“The general understanding around the industry is that LTE is the future,” Warren said, “but there are numerous paths of different lengths toward reaching it.”

Any acceleration of LTE deployment timelines could have serious repercussions on WiMAX, particularly here in the US, where Clearwire is viewed as its champion. While there have been hundreds of WiMAX deployments around the world, most have been small-scale fixed wireless broadband deployments. The operator not only has a mobile broadband business model but a nationwide rollout plan and the $3.2 billion in seed money to execute them. WiMAX and LTE fundamentally use the same radio technology, and WiMAX’s biggest advantage over LTE has been its timing to market. If Verizon were able to cut significantly into Clearwire’s timing advantage, global operators considering deploying WiMAX may abandon the technology entirely.

WiMAX’s initial luster has already worn off. Last year, every major vendor but Ericsson had ramped up a WiMAX product line, hoping to take advantage of the next hot wireless technology. But as more and more global carriers committed to LTE, vendors started backing away from their investments. Nortel chose to abandon its own WiMAX development and instead struck a deal with Alvarion to sell its WiMAX base station. Fujitsu went a similar route, agreeing to co-develop a WiMAX line with Airspan. The three vendors that won Sprint and Clearwire’s initial deployment contracts, Motorola, Samsung and Nokia Siemens Networks, have all stuck by the technology, but other vendors that haven’t won a marquee contract may be exiting WiMAX soon enough. RBC Capital Markets is predicting that Alcatel-Lucent will axe its WiMAX product line this week. “Mobile WiMAX is still futurama stuff in our view, and the high investments required may not justify the market potential,” RBC said in a research note.