Well, the wireless technology that promises faster Internet speeds has finally arrived. The city of Baltimore now has WiMax coverage and Portland, Ore. will get it in early January. More cities are expected to follow.
After some sturm and drang, the stars are finally aligning for Clearwire (CLWRD), the wireless broadband provider that is leading the WiMax charge. Earlier this month, Clearwire completed its merger with Sprint's WiMax unit. And the Kirkland, Wa.-based company, founded by telecom pioneer Craig McCaw, has secured $3.2 billion in funding from Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) and Comcast (CMCSA, Fortune 500), among others.
The stakes are high. Mobile technology is marching toward the point where faster Internet connections are ubiquitous, so we're not just making phone calls from anywhere to anywhere but pumping huge amounts of data too. Infonetics Research estimates the WiMax market will grow to $7.7 billion in 2011.
But the companies behind WiMax aren't the only ones who want to build a vast wireless network. WiMax naysayers point to a rival technology called LTE, or Long Term Evolution, as WiMax's biggest threat. Like WiMax, LTE is known as fourth-generation, or 4G, which is just the cellphone industry's way of describing the next stage of faster speeds on mobile devices. (The current cellular network we use to make calls is 3G, or third-generation.)
Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) and AT&T (T, Fortune 500) have declared their allegiance to LTE, with Verizon saying it will have the technology deployed somewhere in the United States by this time next year. But LTE is still behind WiMax in development, and given the time it also takes for device-makers to line their products behind a new technology, mass adoption is at least a couple years away.
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