Skip to main content

How WiMAX Will Drive Wireless M2M Apps

A new market study predicts that the cellular machine-to-machine (M2M) market will be impacted by the growing momentum behind the deployment of WiMAX as a next-generation WWAN communications technology.

WiMAX is even more spectrally efficient and cost-effective to operate in mobile carrier networks when compared with W-CDMA and CDMA EV-DO, making WiMAX very suitable for low data rate, low ARPU M2M applications -- when and where WiMAX connectivity is available.

Sam Lucero, ABI Research senior analyst, says "Sprint and Clearwire are the two most significant service providers deploying WiMAX in the United States. Sprint, a CDMA-based operator, has selected WiMAX as its path to 4G service offerings."

Sprint will work with Clearwire -- a Craig McCaw startup that has received $600 million in venture backing from Intel and $300 million from Motorola -- to provide joint coverage to each other's respective customers on the nationwide WiMAX networks deployed by the two companies.

Sprint is rapidly deploying WiMAX infrastructure in North America, and believes WiMAX is well-suited to deliver cost-effective, wide area M2M services -- a viewpoint borne out by ABI Research analysis.

There is also growing interest in Europe in the deployment of WiMAX. Furthermore, there are indications suggesting an interest in employing WiMAX for M2M applications such as AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure).

Sprint and Clearwire are only two among a number of interested parties. Lucero adds, "Intel is a key member of a developing WiMAX ecosystem that includes network infrastructure equipment vendors, Motorola and Samsung, as well as CPE vendors such as ZyXEL and Accton. Intel expects nearly a few dozen operators to have deployed WiMAX by 2012."

According to ABI's assessment, municipal Wi-Fi can be deployed at a very low cost and is well-suited for select M2M applications, such as AMI, public safety telematics, and video surveillance.

Popular posts from this blog

The Billions Bet on Tentative AI Demand

Gartner's latest worldwide IT spending forecast exposes a trend every CIO has already felt in budget negotiations. Total spending will climb 14.2 percent in 2026, reaching $6.37 trillion. It seems that the IT infrastructure market is simply having a strong year. However, the more useful insight is how unevenly that growth is distributed. The Headline Number vs. The Real Story Data center systems and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are absorbing capital at a pace several multiples faster than devices, communications services, and traditional IT services. This is not incremental growth spread across a healthy portfolio. It is a wholesale reallocation of enterprise technology budgets toward AI infrastructure, made on the expectation that demand for AI workloads will justify the outlay before that demand has been fully proven. Where the Money is Going Data center systems are forecast to grow 62.5 percent in 2026, that's up from 51.6 percent growth in 2025, reaching $822 billion....