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LTE is often pegged as competing directly with the WiMAX 802.16e standard. Another competing technology, UMB, which is an evolution beyond CMDA EV-DO, occasionally gets thrown into the fray, but with two of CMDA's largest customers recently defecting - Verizon to LTE and Sprint Nextel to WiMAX - the future of UMB is, at best, uncertain. While we all love stories of battles, the truth is that LTE and WiMAX have more or less settled into their logical camps. LTE will largely be used by cellular operators with legacy networks (Sprint being a major exception) and WiMAX has been embraced by Greenfield operators, or fixed operators without any wireless infrastructure.

Depending on who you speak with, LTE networks are either just around the corner or at least two years away. Verizon will start trialling LTE at the end of this year and in Japan, NTT DoCoMo has already awarded early-stage contracts to Panasonic Mobile and Nokia Siemens Networks for its aggressive LTE deployment timetable. However, it won't be until 2010 before commercial LTE starts to gain traction.

With the WiMAX/LTE conundrum settled, the question turns to the factors which will drive deployment of these networks. For operators who're still completing their HSPA investment, what will encourage them to dip into their pockets for LTE? The same goes for prospective WiMAX operators.

While consumers' growing appetite for wireless broadband on their mobile phones is often cited as the driver for these next generation networks, LTE and WiMAX handsets will not be the access devices which push these networks out - not in the short to medium-term. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, as with any early-stage technology, squeezing LTE and WiMAX into a phone will be costly and impact both handset size and power consumption. Secondly, while use of mobile (phone) data has jumped, it is questionable whether it will grow sufficiently rapidly so as to start placing pressure on current HSPA networks. In Vodafone's results for H1 2007, management admitted that their data network is only at 20-25% utilisation.

We believe that it will be non-voice centric devices which will drive the deployment of these next generation networks in the coming years, devices which are less sensitive to size and power restrictions but derive huge value from being able to pull data from a wide area wireless network. Devices such as laptops and ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs) will be the main constituency, enabled either through embedded chips or expanded with USB or PC card add-ons. This is supported by recent data from In-Stat which forecasts that the total WiMAX user terminal chipset market will reach almost $500 million in 2012, growing from $27 million in 2007, driven primarily by "embedded WiMAX in mobile PCs". Intel has made no secret of its desire to eventually embed WiMAX within its laptop chipset designs and companies like InterDigital, which already have HSPA modules optimised for laptop integration, have LTE on their horizons.

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