Making a choice between LTE or WiMAX

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010 Marcio Avillez, VP Network Offerings

On Tuesday, I talked started to talk about “The 4G  Faux Choice,” and wanted to continue on what you should do.

IMHO, given that there won’t be immediate national coverage on either LTE nor WiMAX, the choice should be made on the basis of which carrier has the geographic coverage that best fits your enterprise mobility needs for the period you are committing to.  I recommend the following approach for companies with US-based mobile employees:

• Pick the carrier who’s coverage matches up best today and in the coming year with where your mobile employees will need the service
• Feel free to mix and match carriers and also consider WiFi as an option until 4G becomes ubiquitous in the US
• Go ahead and commit to a 2-year deal, knowing that you will likely have true competition between carriers in 2013 and that you will, in all likelihood, benefit from the fact that you will continue to have some leverage.
• I would consider carefully 3-year commits with a carrier, as 2013 could be an inflexion point as it relates to service pricing, performance, availability and device support
• The Clearwire network architecture will support a move to LTE.  I expect that Clear will make that decision in the next 1-2 years if a dearth of WiMAX devices ensues, or if the devices become too expensive, or if they fall behind LTE devices in terms features/performance.
• If Sprint/Clear have the best footprint, so don’t be afraid to consider them.  The biggest difference between the two networks is how much Verizon Wireless is spending on marketing the quality of their network, rather than the actual reach or quality of their networks.  Both carriers will more than meet the enterprises mobile network performance expectations.

There is no wrong choice between LTE and WiMAX; enterprises can win under either scenario.  There are plenty of questions that you’ll need to answer while developing a well-thought-out enterprise mobility approach.  However, which standard wins out in a 4G world shouldn’t be one of them.  Let the carriers figure that out.

The real question is:  Who can serve my needs today and over the course of the next 2-3 years from a geographic coverage perspective?

Tags: 4G network, LTE, WiMAX