Daily Wireless and Om Malik have made me aware of a free white-paper by the OECD with predictions on how WiMAX might develop in the market and how it compares and competes with other technologies such as UMTS, HSDPA and CDMA 1xEV-DO.
Just having completed a chapter on WiMAX for my upcoming book, my experience is that most of the stuff to be found about WiMAX on the Internet at the moment are marketing articles with greatly exaggerated claims or simply wrong technical facts. Most authors probably never bothered to read the standards documents. This paper is refreshingly different. It is not very technical but the author must have had a fair technical background to come to his conclusions on how the technology compares and competes. Except for very few things I totally agree with the white-paper. Very well done and unbiased.
People who left comments at the original post over at Om Malik’s blog seem to think that the report draws a rather negative picture of the technology. I can’t read that out of the report. It says WiMAX has a bumpy road ahead but that’s just normal for any technology at this stage. On closer inspection the paper says that some crucial decisions have been done right when designing WiMAX to give it a better chance in the market than most other systems which aimed to do the same thing in the past (e.g. Wireless Local Loop…)