Editing WiMAX (section)

== Competing technologies ==
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Within the marketplace, WiMAX's main competition came from existing, widely deployed wireless systems such as [[Universal Mobile Telecommunications System]] (UMTS), [[CDMA2000]], existing Wi-Fi, mesh networking and eventually 4G (LTE).

[[Image:Wimax.svg|right|thumb|upright=1.5 |Speed vs. mobility of wireless systems: [[Wi-Fi]], [[High Speed Packet Access]] (HSPA), [[Universal Mobile Telecommunications System]] (UMTS), [[GSM]]]]
In the future, competition will be from the evolution of the major cellular standards to [[4G]],{{update inline|date=April 2025}} high-bandwidth, low-latency, all-IP networks with voice services built on top. The worldwide move to 4G for GSM/UMTS and [[Advanced Mobile Phone System|AMPS]]/[[Telecommunications Industry Association|TIA]] (including CDMA2000) is the [[3GPP Long Term Evolution]] (LTE) effort.

The LTE Standard was finalized in December 2008, with the first commercial deployment of LTE carried out by TeliaSonera in Oslo and Stockholm in December, 2009. Henceforth, LTE saw rapidly increasing adoption by mobile carriers around the world.

Although WiMax was much earlier to market than LTE, LTE was an upgrade and extension of previous 3G (GSM and CDMA) standards, whereas WiMax was a relatively new and different technology without a large user base. Ultimately, LTE won the war to become the 4G standard because mobile operators such as Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone, NTT, and Deutsche Telekom chose to extend their investments in know-how, equipment and spectrum from 3G to LTE, rather than adopt a new technology standard. It would never have been cost-effective for WiMax network operators to compete against fixed-line broadband networks based on 4G technologies. By 2009, most mobile operators began to realize that mobile connectivity (not fixed 802.16e) was the future, and that LTE was going to become the new worldwide mobile connectivity standard, so they chose to wait for LTE to develop rather than switch from 3G to WiMax.

WiMax was a superior technology in terms of speed (roughly 25&nbsp;Mbit/s) for a few years (2005-2009), and it pioneered some new technologies such as MIMO. But the mobile version of WiMax (802.16m), intended to compete with GSM and CDMA technologies, was too little/too late in getting established, and by the time the LTE standard was finalized in December 2008, the fate of WiMax as a mobile solution was doomed and it was clear that LTE (not WiMax) would become the world's new 4G standard. The largest wireless broadband partner using WiMax, Clearwire, announced in 2008 that they would begin overlaying their existing WiMax network with LTE technology, which was necessary for Clearwire to obtain investments they needed to stay in business.

In some areas of the world, the wide availability of UMTS and a general desire for standardization meant spectrum was not allocated for WiMAX: in July 2005, the [[European Union|EU]]-wide frequency allocation for WiMAX was blocked.{{citation needed|date=August 2012}}

=== Harmonization ===
Early WirelessMAN standards, The European standard [[HiperMAN]] and Korean standard [[WiBro]] were harmonized as part of WiMAX and are no longer seen as competition but as complementary.{{citation-needed|date=April 2025}} All networks now being deployed in South Korea, the home of the WiBro standard, are now WiMAX.{{citation-needed|date=April 2025}}

=== Comparison with other mobile Internet standards ===

{{Main|Comparison of wireless data standards}}