The 4G Faux Choice: LTE or WiMAX?
Monday, May 10th, 2010 Marcio Avillez, VP Network Offerings
As an IT Manager, you are tasked with divining industry trends and making choices that enable your enterprise to remain competitive and, perhaps, making choices that create an opportunity for competitive advantage. Enterprise mobility decisions have either risen to the top of your list or are in the process doing so very rapidly.
One of the questions we hear frequently from customers is regarding the much-written-about battle for the hearts and minds of the mobile carriers between the competing 4G standards: WiMAX and LTE. I was on call with an IT manager for one of our large customers and he asked me about the 4G standards and my opinion on what the implications were for enterprises. He promptly concluded what is obvious from everything you read – LTE has won. What became obvious to me in the course of the several minute discussion that ensued is that while there has been much written about these standards, their benefits and who is adopting them, there has been very little written from an enterprise perspective.
So here is a humble attempt to take a public discussion that is being pursued mostly for the benefit of carriers and equipment manufacturers and try to bring it home for IT managers who are struggling with the question: “OK, great, what should we do about it?”
Ultimately, as an IT manager you’re the best person to answer that question for your company. What I hope to be able to do is help to cut through some of the information clutter and perhaps bust a few “well-known truths” down to size along the way. . .
LTE will win out in the long run. Therefore I should cast my lot with a carrier that supports LTE, correct?
If you were a technology architect at a mobile carrier, the answer to: “Which 4G technology standard will win out in the long run?” is probably the first thing you need to know, in order to plan future purchases and allocate resources to future projects. But you are not, and the long run is at least 2-3 budget cycles from today. What is more important to the enterprise than what the prevailing technology will be 2-3 years from now is: what you can get that meets your needs this year and next. It is less important to work with a carrier that has made an early commitment to LTE, as practically all carriers will begin the process of deploying LTE-based services in the next 2-3 years.
LTE will be available by the end of the year, so I should wait to make a decision until then.
True, LTE will be available according to Verizon Wireless by the end of this year. However, I don’t see this as a reason to delay making a decision. Waiting for the end of this year for LTE is great if the mobility needs of your enterprise are limited to the few cities where LTE services will be available. If that is not the case, please read on. . .
If you read in between the lines of the recent Verizon Wireless announcement, their 4G coverage won’t reach 100% of the National Football League (NFL) cities until end of 2011 and won’t match the current 3G coverage until the end of 2013! The reality of the network deployment game is that Sprint, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, through their partnership with Clearwire, will likely reach coverage at 100% of the NFL cities by early Q1 2011, putting them 9-12 months ahead of the Verizon rollout.
There will be a bigger selection of devices for LTE, doesn’t that mean I need to focus on that technology?
The reality is that today, there are more devices available for WiMAX than LTE. That is likely to change over the next 2-3 years. For next 2 years, I wouldn’t consider it a limiting factor. Frankly with Intel behind WiMAX, there is reason to believe that within the next 2-4 years WiMAX-enabled PCs could become just as ubiquitous as WiFi-enabled ones are today. I wouldn’t necessarily plan on it, but it is a possibility.
The reality is the existence of two carriers (for now) making such large capital investments to upgrade their mobile data networks is good for enterprise because it gives you a choice, today.
Making a choice between LTE or WiMax – stay tuned for Part 2…
Tags: 4G network, carriers, LTE, WiMAX
