Jeffrey Belk, the senior vice president of marketing for Qualcomm, has published a 31-page white paper about WiMAX. Regardless of your views, Qualcomm is a very influencial player in the wireless data space so the paper, "Why MAX?," certainly is worth perusing.
In his paper Jeff sees a role for the technology, although he's not much of a fan of WiMAX for mobile applications. It's no surprise that Jeff prefers CDMA 1xEV-DO since Qualcomm produces chipsets for that higher-speed wireless data technology.
To be fair, though, Jeff's a smart guy and I assume he indeed believes what he's writing. The fact that he's employed by Qualcomm certainly isn't a reason to dismiss his opinions. On the contrary, his opinions not only should be considered but are, I suspect, held by many others.
Fixed versus mobile WiMAX
Jeff writes, "So we believe that Fixed WiMAX has a play. But even at one twentieth to one thirtieth the size of the mobility opportunity, that's not a sure thing.
"In the system simlulations were are doing on Mobile WiMAX, it's not clear whether WiMAX has ANY advantages over the evolutionary path for CDMA2000 or WCDMA/HSDPA WWAN. The key here is that the WiMAX folks cannot credibly show slides showing 'WiMAX theory" circa 2007/2008 against 3G WWAN circa 2004/2005....
"In our view, Mobile WiMAX is potential caught in the middle between the rapidly developing WWAN standards such as CDMA2000/1xEV-DO and WCDMA/HSDPA and the WLAN standards that are evolving from 802.11a/b/g to 802.11n.
"And other evolving standards such as Flarion's Flash OFDM caveated above." [Qualcomm recently purchased Flarion.]
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