A very interesting piece in The Korea Times today about WiBro versus LTE. WiBro, or "wireless broadband" is a locally developed variant of Mobile Wimax. It was developed jointly with Intel and grows out of WiFi, representing the computer industry's claim to 4G mobile status. LTE, on the other hand, is an outgrowth of W-CDMA technology and is backed by wireless companies, including Ericsson.
According to the article, some experts suggest that LTE will eventually garner 70 percent of the global market for 4G mobile services. This despite the fact that it isn't even in the marketplace yet. It seems to me that the real questions are (1) who will get WiBro or LTE-equipped notebooks, netbooks, handsets and modems into the marketplace first AND (2) how much consumers will value the additional speed provided by a WiBro-equipped device.
WiBro works and it appears to work just fine. We won't know the outcome of this for another year or two, but I'd expect something more like a 60-40 or even 50-50 split of the global market between LTE and WiBRO.
Mobile carriers are so attracted to LTE because they can implement it by upgrading their current WCDMA networks rather than building new infrastructure. I'm not sure about the current speeds achieved by each technology, but I know that Nortel and LG (a former client of mine) demonstrated some ridiculously fast downolad speeds at GSMA. If WiBro ends up winnining a sizable market share I'll be quite surprised.
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