WiMax's Long-Term Evolution - Unstrung

WiMax's Long-Term Evolution
Unstrung
Dan Jones

July 17, 2008

It certainly doesn't seem impossible that WiMax could one day end up as a subset of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) wireless technology. Both are already based on the same underlying radio technology, and there has already been some talk of standardization.

I spent some time yesterday chatting to Eran Eshed, co-founder and VP of marketing and business development at Altair Semiconductor, and he suggests that this way it would be best for WiMax to go:

"I think that's WiMax's best chance, to harmonize with LTE, to become the TDD profile of LTE," Eshed says.

TDD (time division duplex) systems, in case you've forgotten, send and receive information in the same band at different times, as opposed to FDD (frequency division duplex) systems, which use paired bands to send and receive data. TDD systems are generally considered more useful, especially in spectrum-constrained environments, because they typically use less bandwidth than FDD systems.

What say you, readers? Will WiMax merely be subsumed by LTE in years to come?