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There has been so much focus on WiMAX' flagship operator, Clearwire, that it is easy to forget that most of the system's growth has come from emerging markets, particularly in Asia. In advance of MWC, Intel and its WiMAX partners have been playing up the technology's global credentials, and even have their eyes on China, which is often assumed to be the preserve of LTE.

Alcatel-Lucent recently said its LTE/WiMAX offering, which uses a common platform and supports mixed deployments across different terrains, would be targeted primarily at China. Although the three cellcos all have roadmaps to the country's TD-LTE technology, they (and some independent ISPs) also hold 3.5GHz spectrum and are also talking about using WiMAX for rural services. No doubt targeting this opportunity, Huawei has opened a WiMAX Interoperability Testing (IOT) laboratory in Beijing, in partnership with Intel, the latest stage in their four-year WiMAX partnership. Huawei says it has over 2,000 engineers engaged in WiMAX R&D.

Meanwhile, the WiMAX Forum has announced that 802.16 networks now cover 430m people worldwide and are on a path to nearly double to 800m pops by end of 2010. This is based on almost 460 deployments in 135 countries, and new roll-outs will be driven by auctions in India and Brazil, among others. "In both emerging markets and mature countries, companies and governments are deploying 4G WiMAX networks to help bridge the digital divide," said Intel's executive VP and wireless chief Sean Maloney.

Researchers at ¬Strategy Analytics predict that consumer WiMAX subscriptions in the developing countries of Asia will grow from a few thousand now to almost 27m by 2013, with the main growth outside major cities. Subscriptions in villages and small towns are forecast to grow at almost 300% per year, three times the rate of large metro areas, because of government supported digital divide initiatives, and strong demand growth in underserved bases.

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