http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/news/article.php/3806831
WiMAX Struggles to Find a Foothold in Western Europe By Gerry Blackwell February 25, 2009
Will WiMAX become an orphan technology? Has the big push from 3G in the last two years and the prospect of 4G pushed WiMAX to the margins?
As we saw in the first installment of this multi-part series, which covered the UK and Ireland, WiMAX is indeed in a difficult position, at least in the developed world.
It will be a different story when we turn to Eastern Europe (next), Africa, and the Far East in future installments. But in the rest of Western Europe, which we explore here, the picture is much as in the UK and Ireland.
“I think the industry is just looking somewhere else right now, it’s not looking at WiMAX,” says Emma Mohr-McClune, German-based principal analyst for wireless services in Europe at Current Analysis, a U.S. firm.
“There are plenty of examples in our industry of great technologies, which didn’t get the support in time to make it into the mass market and I have a feeling that’s what’s going to happen [with WiMAX].”
The reasons are simple. Established service providers are committed to 3G network solutions based on legacy GSM technology—which means High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), and in the future, LTE (Long Term Evolution).
Beaten to the punch
After five years of deployments, HSDPA is a mature technology in Europe. Urban and suburban areas of most countries are saturated with coverage. Networks deliver theoretical peak download throughput of 3.6 megabits per second (Mbps), even when the device is mobile. Many users are deciding they don’t need anything more.
Mohr-McClune guesstimates the percentage of the Western European population left uncovered by 3G at 10%. “And as you go north, penetration gets better and better. There’s just not much of a business case for WiMAX.”
Meanwhile, WiMAX lacks standardization, device compatibility, and “increasingly, a clear roadmap,” she contends. While it has a theoretical head start over cellular technologies in wireless broadband, the cellular technologies are catching up.
“Why would [cellular providers] go with a whole new technology when their legacy technology is continuing to evolve, and getting very fast? The faster cellular networks get, the less incentive there is for them to go with a different technology.”
This may be an excessively mobile-centric perspective, though. Howard Wilcox, a senior analyst at UK-based Juniper Research, doesn’t see WiMAX competing head to head with 3G—or at least not yet.
“I think if you talk to a selection of WiMAX and 3G operators, they would say that they are not competing with each other, that they view it as more complementary than competitive,” Wilcox says. “I think it’s horses for courses.”
In other words, what’s suitable for some isn’t necessarily suitable for all. WiMAX, he suggests, could still find a market among users, even in urban centers, who need higher-speed connectivity while mobile than they can get from 3G—architects who need to transmit large blueprint files, for example.
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