The race between LTE and WiMax, intriguing before the economy crashed, now is even a great deal more interesting. The basic scenario is that WiMax is already is in commercial deployment - with Clearwire's Clear service and other people - whilst LTE is rushing into production and has had commitments from powerhouse networks such as AT&T and Verizon. The bad monetary landscape makes each move even extra important. The margin of error -- in no way wonderful for an costly new technology - is even smaller in the course of attempting times.
That is why just about every piece of news, superior or poor, is essential. What is becoming announced is crucial in its own ideal - and also can push the momentum toward or away from the technology. The newest news is important - and not extremely beneficial for LTE. GigaOm reports on word from Deutsche Bank that Qualcomm chipsets for data cards will be delayed until the second half of 2010 and for handsets until "well into" the next year. The story goes into detail, but the bottom line is that this will play havoc with the launch. Basically, the development of a high-speed network is rendered a moot point if couple of persons have the technology in their mobile devices to take benefit of it.
In some instances, it is valuable to read between the lines. A recent blog posting reports upon comments created by Michael Mamaghani, Qualcomm's director of advertising, at the Globalpress Summit Conference last week in San Francisco. Mamaghani said all the proper good things about LTE, which his enterprise is backing. He also stated all the proper dismissive points about WiMax, which it is not. The subtleties involved how he addressed the timeframe for LTE. He initially described the gap between the finalization of the 3G common and what he considers mass commercialization. He then utilized that time period to predict that LTE will not hit the masses in a big way until the 2012 to 2014 timeframe. The underlying message is that the timing of the network rollout is not fully up to the carrier. The attitude and opinion of vendors - some of which may have considerably different agendas and priorities - is a substantial consideration.
The introduction of gear that utilizes a new networking protocol is a gradual method. Extra accurately, it is a set of gradual processes. The chips could possibly be integrated into larger devices - laptops instead of phones, for instance - initially. For numerous factors, there typically are pre-production versions of phones that house the LTE functionality separately. These units will be bulky and eat batteries alive and therefore aren't intended for wide deployment. A third problem is the preparation of the various technical and organization infrastructure elements beyond the core technologies needed to support large scale commercial numbers. The key is gating all of these fluid evolutionary cycles against the key element: Customer demand. Some of these problems are . The bottom line is that Verizon pronouncements that LTE will be readily available in a certain amount of markets by a particular date is tentative and clearly open to delay.
A pretty intriguing WirelessWeek piece talks a bit much more normally about the transition from 1 platform to the next. There appears to be fine news and challenges. The beneficial news is that "it appears the market has learned a couple of lessons." It is most likely to begin with larger scale integrations and, in general, keep away from some of the missteps of the past. Thus, for instance, it could possibly initially deploy the chips in dongles rather of instantly putting the technologies into cell phones. On the other side of the coin, there simply are a great deal more protocols to be integrated as the business ages. The bottom line is that there still is a lot of detail-oriented work to be carried out.
Actual rollouts are worlds away from press release fantasy lands. It remains to be noticed whether the delays materialize, dissipate or get worse. What is particular is that Verizon Wireless was pushing for earlier deployments than when thought most likely, and was trying to build excitement. From that perspective, any delays will not be useful.
