Everything You Need to Know About 4G

Interesting article!

About 70% of the technology behind WiMAX and LTE are the same. The article mentioned OFDMA, but there will be similarities in antenna design as well.

It is also interesting to note that the evolution of GSM technology to High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) was part of the evolution to UMTS (Universal Mobile Telephone System) which was also known as Wideband CDMA.

The other big difference is mentioned in the article, but not really explained. WiMAX uses a time division scheme and LTE will use frequency division. (CDMA is a frequency division scheme, too). The advantage of WiMAX in this case is more efficient use of spectrum. WiMAX can be deployed in spectrum blocks of 1.25MHz to 20MHz, although you will probably see no smaller than 8.25 MHz and most likely in 10MHz or 20MHz blocks. In order to get the high data rates, LTE has to use 20 MHz blocks.

All radio technologies like this are shared bandwidth. Whether WiMAX or LTE (GSM, CDMA, too for that matter) you can only have so many users on a given cell at a given time, and they have to share the bandwidth. More users = slower speeds, generally. So the technology that is most efficient in terms of spectrum will be able to provide the highest speeds to the greatest number of users at any given time and place. Right now, it looks like WiMAX will be able to do that. (Of course, this gets into another discussion: how much spectrum does each carrier own? That will affect what a service provider will be able to offer.)