Gartner Research released a report a few days back about the state of the WiMAX market concluding that businesses should wait on investing in the technology. I have seen a lot of media coverage on this, and as a proud advocate of WiMAX, I’d like to throw my two cents into the mix.

It seems most reports and analysis of the WiMAX market these days result in heated debates across the blogosphere and media outlets. This report, by analyst Phillip Redman, was certainly no exception. Personally, I love to see these debates – the back and forth brings some very compelling arguments out into the open and I think it’s a great thing for the wireless industry, in general.

Network World’s Brad Reed did a nice job summarizing the key points of the report in a recent article some of which I would like to address here. The quotes included below are from that piece.

“Gartner projects that while WiMAX networks in the United States will start operating commercially over the next two years, WiMAX itself will remain a “niche technology” that will best serve emerging or rural markets that don’t already have access to broadband services. One of the big factors that WiMAX has going against it, says Gartner, is that WiMAX networks won’t be able to provide nationwide coverage for quite some time, as Sprint and its Clearwire partners will only begin launching commercial WiMAX services for the first time this September. Thus, says Gartner analyst Phillip Redman, businesses will have to wait until coverage extends to many more cities than the ones that will be covered by the end of the year.”

While I do agree that WiMAX will be a very useful technology for those in “emerging and rural markets,” I think there is more that should be taken into consideration. A bit of background: When Towerstream was formed back in 1999, we were first going to serve as a backhaul for American Tower as a way to aggregate at the tower for EV-DO . But 3G/EV-DO never showed up, so we shifted to our current model, a B-to-B alternative last mile, using wireless technology.

For years, we were told that we should go to rural markets where there is less competition. But we decided to start in Boston, a very wired and competitive broadband market to prove that there was demand for an alternative. From there, in an effort to figure out if Boston was a fluke, we launched in NYC – the most wired market in the world. New York is now our fastest growing market. Our experience as a service provider using this technology just does not agree with Gartner’s analysis. Every day, Towerstream and other companies in the space DigitalBridge, etc, are successfully competing against fiber and the phone companies in the largest markets in the world.

Back to the article. “In competitive markets, WiMAX is going to have a very tough row since it’s starting from scratch,” Redman says. “But WiMAX still has great opportunities in different markets. I think it makes sense in developing markets and developing economies that don’t have broadband comp from wireline carriers.”

In my eyes, WiMAX will have no more of a difficult time in competitive markets than LTE – or any other emerging wireless broadband technology for that matter. In fact, the technology has already proven that it is able to compete in “competitive markets” like New York City and Los Angeles, offering better quality service for lower prices.

So, let’s get the facts straight:

• Analysts didn’t correctly predict 3G adoption, performance and rollout. Their analyses should be considered, but not accepted blindly.
• WiMAX has proven that it can compete with traditional broadband in a competitive market
• There is a huge difference in performance from 3G to WiMAX and very little difference from WiMAX to LTE (both OFDM technologies)
• WiMAX equipment is already shipping – LTE is not

What do you think? As Clearwire prepares to launch its mobile WiMAX network in September and the Intel Centrino 2 chip offering an option for WiMAX, the battle for wireless broadband has officially begun.