In 2008, Sprint launched their Wimax network and changed the mobile landscape. When it was initially launched in Baltimore, Sprint felt it was in a position of strength that would be difficult to touch for several years. Now in 2012, Sprint has phased out Wimax and all mobile carriers in the US plan to launch a 4G LTE network for their phones, tablets and dongles.

Dan Hesse must have been proud. After taking the helm of Sprint, he decided to partner with Clearwire to deliver 4G to the United States. The advantages were clear; Wimax was able to offer speeds that other 3G networks could not. Sprint was going to take its Wimax service nationwide in an attempt to add users after years of losing them to the competition.

Things did not go as well as planned. Clearwire continued to lose money, and instead of continuing to work with Sprint to bring Wimax to every corner of the United States, they had to come up with a plan to stay solvent. Sprint continued to pump money into Clearwire, which also compromised its position. In other parts of the world, Wimax is popular and has been used to provide residential voice and data services, but use with mobile phones was limited. Sprint was using Wimax at 2.5 GHz, which made it difficult for the signal to penetrate walls and buildings, but its phones suffered in the battery life department. Many of those who used Sprint 4G phones ended up not using the service because they couldn’t access the network or didn’t want to suffer from the drop in battery performance.

This left room for other mobile operators to make up their own minds about Wimax and decide there had to be another way. Everything changed on December 5, 2010 when Verizon announced that it would launch 4G LTE. Since that announcement, they have expanded into hundreds of markets across the US, with AT&T following suit. Even Sprint is in the process of transitioning its network to LTE. Now that we’ve analyzed what happened, let’s analyze why. It all boils down to two words: upgrade path.

LTE is an excellent overlay technology for existing GSM and HSPA networks. LTE is also seen as an upgrade path for TD-SCDMA which is used in China. Wimax evolved from Wi-Fi, but as networks moved from GPRS to EDGE to HSPA, mobile providers had to figure out what was next. LTE offered the ability to provide more voice with more efficient use of bandwidth. As more and more networks announced they were transitioning to LTE and more equipment manufacturers got behind it, Wimax didn’t stand a chance.

Also, from a speed point of view, Wimax has a maximum speed of 30 Mb/s, while LTE has a maximum speed of 100 Mb/s. If you have to split the bandwidth, you will be more likely to do so when the speed is higher. The last difference, and probably the most important, is that LTE uses a SIM card, while Wimax is more of an open standard. This means that other wireless carriers would have a hard time making their network unique from their competitors. With LTE, mobile operators can make their devices exclusive to each other.

Wimax is still useful for many different applications, but on mobile devices, 4G LTE is winning and could stay that way.