The Global Market for Mobile WiMax is Forecast to Decline to 320 Thousand Subscribers by 2022

Growing Telecom Operator Spending On LTE Infrastructure Inflicts a Major Setback for Mobile WiMax in the Technology War, According to a New Report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc.

GIA launches comprehensive analysis of industry segments, trends, growth drivers, market share, size and demand forecasts on the global Mobile WiMax market. The global market for Mobile WiMax is forecast to decline to 320 thousand subscribers by 2022, driven into an increasingly narrow niche by growing telecom operator spending on 4G/Long Term Evolution (LTE) infrastructure and strong double digit gains in LTE subscriber base.

Developed two years ahead of LTE, mobile WiMax which initially started out as one of the most promising and hottest broadband wireless technologies during the early 2000s is now in terminal decline, crushed and elbowed aside by the more powerful LTE (long term evolution) technology. The launch of mobile WiMax was a major win over the more conventional cellular broadband technologies. The technology during the early years of its launch was revered for its numerous benefits such as the ability to offer high speed Internet access to a greater number of subscribers in inadequately serviced remote areas; ability to provide high-speed connections across diverse devices including mobile phones and computers; elimination of physical limitations of traditional wired infrastructure and ability to increase bandwidth capacity at relatively lower costs. The technology was heralded as the most disruptive innovation capable of enabling service providers develop and launch new generation of IP centric services.

The question which was hotly debated over two years ago as to whether mobile WiMAX or LTE (long term evolution) will go mainstream is finally put to rest. Recent and current trends in the industry strongly indicate LTE as the next commercial successor to the current "3.5G" HSPA (high speed packet access) standard. LTE has currently hit the mainstream mass market, supported by strong endorsement and adoption of the technology by major carriers such as NTT DoCoMo, Verizon Wireless, China Mobile, and Vodafone. In comparison, WiMax technology has largely remained niche with adoption limited to developing countries with underdeveloped telecom infrastructure heavily skewed towards 2G and 3G networks. Currently, a combination of 3G, WCDMA, HSPA, and LTE technologies are seen as adequate to provide the user experience targeted by service providers in a an increasingly data and speed hungry digitalized economy. In developed countries with advanced telecom infrastructure, HSPA continues to dominate as the most preferred platform for delivering mobile broadband services. The expectation that both mobile WiMax and HSPA will achieve comparable levels of performance has finally gone up in smoke.  In comparison to mobile WiMax’s niche market position, HSPA currently accounts for over 25% to 35% of all mobile broadband deployments. A large number of network operators on the 3G spectrum have adopted HSDPA (including HSUPA and HSPA+) as the natural migration path to 4G. HSPA already flaunts a large ecosystem of components, subsystems, equipment suppliers and network design and implementation services. This is largely due to the fact that despite the significantly higher theoretical peak data transfer rates promised by mobile WiMax, network operators have preferred HSPA since a WiMax base station provides lower coverage than HSPA. Therefore migrating to a WiMax technology would entail higher network capex for radio access equipment, thus making HSPA more cost effective in comparison.

As stated by the new market research report on Mobile WiMax, developed and developing markets are forecast to witness huge erosion in growth. While the U.S and European markets decline at a compounded annual rate of 49.7% and 43.0%, Asia-Pacific is also forecast to witness erosion of similar magnitude at 40.8%. Erosion in Asia comes from the fact that even developing countries which are currently the only source of major revenues are withdrawing support from the technology as it becomes increasingly clear that WiMAX will most certainly remain a niche with limited potential in driving long-term development of wireless-based broadband access services. Given that the growth of businesses, people, communities and society in digitalized economies depends heavily on broadband development, a growing number of governments in developing countries are currently wary of deploying high value broadband services on first generation TDD WiMAX technology.

Major players in the market include Airspan Networks, Inc., Alvarion Technologies Ltd., Aperto Networks, Inc., Axxcelera Broadband Wireless, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Mobile Mark, Inc., National Instruments Corporation, Vecima Networks, Inc., and Zyxel Communications Corp., among others.

The research report titled “Mobile WiMax: A Global Strategic Business Report” announced by Global Industry Analysts Inc., provides a comprehensive review of market trends, issues, drivers, mergers, acquisitions and other strategic industry activities of global companies.  The report provides market estimates and projections for all major geographic markets such as the USA, Canada, Japan, Europe (France, Germany, Italy, UK, Spain, Russia and Rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Rest of World.

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