Sprint-Clearwire Rides Again, LTE Makes Inroads

But although both service providers and some vendors are taking sides on the WiMAX versus LTE fight, these technologies actually share as much as 75 to 80 percent of the same DNA, creating potential for cross-technology roaming.

“Every 75 cents spent on WiMAX can be reusable for LTE,” said Michael Seymour, vice president of Alcatel-Lucent's North American broadband wireless unit.

All this is good news for the big players like Alltel, AT&T, Clearwire and Verizon (whose big win in the 700MHz auction drove a stake through the heart of the FCC’s dream of having that spectrum be used by new competitors rather than incumbents), but to some extent, it seems to leave smaller players who want to pursue 4G wireless in the dust, given that very little 2.5GHz spectrum remains.

“There are some markets that Clearwire and the others are not interested in building out, so you’ll see affiliate players and roaming agreements because they’ll want to offer seamless ubiquity as you move out of the major hot zones,” predicted Alcatel-Lucent’s Seymour. “There are also a few pockets of spectrum still around, maybe 100MHz in the 2.5GHz band left for other folks. There are also other alternative frequencies such as the 3.5GHz in Canada. And while it’s a bit more difficult in the U.S. for the 2.3GHz, we can leverage that as well.”

Entrepreneurial types also can take some comfort in the fact that there’s still plenty of EV-DO and HSPA being built out, along with installed Wi-Fi and proprietary solutions for businesses.

“When you compare speeds between LTE and existing technologies like HSPA, it’s extremely compelling [when you consider we can deliver 4G speeds today],” said Bhikshesvaran. “AT&T said it will deliver 20mbps on HSPA by next year. And that’s on the ground today — it doesn’t have to be built, because these networks will get upgraded just by using software.”

At the same time, the device ecosystem for HSPA is exploding. Ericsson’s laptop module affords 12mbps downstream and 2mbps upstream bandwidth, and has been licensed by Lenovo and Dell, who aim to embed it in their gear.

“This is going to be huge starting in the second half of the year when we have built-in mobile broadband in the laptop,” said Bhikshesvaran. “As much as there's discussion around Clearwire, we see mobile broadband here today, and that will be compelling in the second half.”

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