Russia's Yota network, which connects 300,000 people over WiMAX technology, is switching to LTE, and plans to spend $2 billion migrating its network to the different air interface.
Backed heavily by Intel, which hoped to make WiMAX as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi, the tide turned in favor of LTE when virtually all the world's mobile service providers decided to back LTE instead of WiMAX.
WiMAX had a headstart getting to market, but LTE now has closed the gap. Early adopters argued that they had to get to market fast, so WiMAX made sense. But the rival LTE air interface now stands to garner so much production volume that it now makes more sense, going forward, even for early adopters such as Yota.
Yota should be able to upgrade using software, some argue, as the Samsung-supplied base stations Yota uses can support both FDD-LTE and TD-LTE, and Yota uses spectrum well suited to the time division variant of LTE.
The new LTE network will start in Kazan, Novosibirsk and Samara, with Moscow and St. Petersburg to follow by the end of 2011. The 15 cities previously scheduled for WiMAX deployment will go straight to LTE.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
World's 2nd-Largest WiMAX Network Switches to LTE
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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