Last week, I had the opportunity to attend the huge wireless conference run by the US industry in Las Vegas – “CTIA Wireless”. As one would expect in the US, WiMAX had a high degree of prominence in the conference’s promotions.

In technology, as in politics, when people disagree it is not necessarily because one or other party is stupid, but probably because they see the world from different perspectives. In this regard, a keynote address by Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint Nextel, the only major carrier promoting a mobile Internet solution based on WiMAX (as opposed to HSPA or LTE), gave me an interesting insight into the perspective of the WiMAX camp. He made a comment that WiMAX was at least 2 years ahead of the competition. Given by “the competition” I can only presume he is referring to LTE (chosen by one of his major competitors, Verizon – the others are already deploying HSPA) and that this comment is on the basis of LTE being the first GSM-track technology to deploy OFDM.

This notion that competitiveness is purely based on the technology utilised by the access radio network (OFDM versus WCDMA) is somewhat intriguing. The competitiveness of a wireless technology is going to be determined by mobility, breadth and depth of coverage, speed and responsiveness, range of services and pricing packages that are offered to customers. In terms of user experience and services, WiMAX is well behind the GSM-track technologies, specifically HSDPA which has been used for mobile Internet services for over 2 years now and HSPA for some twelve months. We have yet to see any clear model for WiMAX services – particularly critical factors such as authentication and roaming, messaging and voice. While there is no inherent reason why WiMAX cannot provide such services, it has not done so to date and with any new technology ecosystem, there is a period of ‘bedding down’ during which things do not work as they should. Technology solutions take time to reach an operational maturity. In the case of the GSM-track technologies, there has been roughly 18 years of this maturing process so carriers and their customers know pretty well what to expect in terms of the user experience and services provided by successive generations of the technology – including LTE.

By now some of you are jumping up and down and saying what about speed and cost? Well in terms of the former, the network bit rate is determined by factors such as channel bandwidth and MIMO. All the indications are, if you do an apples for apples comparison, you will be hard pressed to show that either WiMAX or HSPA are anything but comparable at a pure radio technology level. Put 2 engineers in a room and you will get 5 different opinions on which is better. Price is an even more murky comparison. The WiMAX camp argues that CDMA royalties make the cost of HSPA higher but I have yet to see any evidence to support this (and I have done some research on it). In addition, with over 80% of the world market, GSM-track technologies have a scale economy that others could only dream to enjoy.

Finally one thing that intrigued me was while I saw many posters about WiMAX, I did not see any actual services at CTIA. I cannot claim my search to be exhaustive, but I went to an Internet café run by Nokia to promote their WiMAX tablet device (N810) and to my surprise the connectivity was provided by WiFi not WiMAX. When I asked why, the answer was, at best, evasive.