Although the WiMAX movement continues to focus on mobile opportunities, it is the traditional fixed wireless markets that will remain the technology's main source of revenue through 2009, according to a new report from Visant Strategies. The worldwide wireless broadband audience of five million in 2005 is expected to grow by 40% yearly through 2010 and Visant Strategies believes WiMAX vendors will be perfectly poised to take advantage of this building market. In the report, “802.16/WiMAX: Assessment of Fixed and Mobile Opportunities,” Visant Strategies foresees a $3.4 billion annual opportunity for fixed and portable broadband equipment by 2010. The author of the report, Andy Fuertes, predicts that 50% of that market will be accounted for by WiMAX, but that there will be a delay of two to four years before WiMAX is deployed in the mobile network. However, he observed that WiMAX is replacing wire-based broadband access such as cable modem and digital subscriber line at an increased rate. The mobile WiMAX community is faced with political, technical and competitive challenges, the report found, impacting time to market, which is paramount since the 802.16e specification is not finished. Yet, WiMAX will still become a factor in the mobile market in the years to come since most operators will not commit to additional major upgrades prior to 2009 and the standard is gaining support. FLASH-OFDM, TD-CDMA and future revisions of 3GPP and 3GPP2 will also play a role in the fixed and mobile markets. Some of these platforms, especially FLASH-OFDM, already have considerable technical and time to market advantages over mobile WiMAX.

The study provides global and regional forecasts for fixed and mobile 802.16 and BWA base stations and CPE shipments and equipment revenues as well as fixed and mobile 802.16 and BWA subscribers and service revenues through 2010. Estimates for 802.16 chipset shipments and revenues are also provided through 2010.

For more information, visit www.visantstrategies.com