Maravedis recently announced a comprehensive WiMAX and wireless broadband market research report entitled “WiMAX and Broadband Wireless (Sub-11Ghz) Worldwide Market Analysis and Trends 2005-2010”. The study reports that the broadband wireless market (sub-11Ghz) has grown substantially over the past two years.  Maravedis projects that the market will exceed $2 billion by the end of 2009.

 “The top two pre-requisites for WiMAX success according to service providers surveyed is a CPE below $300 and higher throughput” says Adlane Fellah, principal researcher and founder of Maravedis. According to Robert Syputa, co-author and senior analyst of Maravedis, “Wireless broadband is clearly at a crossroads. Convergence is taking place between the technology road maps of WiMAX/802.16 and advanced 3GPP, 3.5G-4G cellular systems. These technologies are on a collision course and will provide similar bandwidth and significant market overlap by 2010.”

 Fellah continued, “Service providers and end-users will benefit from the adoption of WiMAX systems which will help reduce equipment and component costs through integration and economies of scale. We expect the cost reduction impact to be mostly on the CPE and foresee data only CPE at less than $100 by 2010.”

 According to the report, the adoption of broadband wireless access (BWA) is driven by the overall explosion in demand for broadband services. Vendors have made a lot of progress in terms of product enhancement and cost reduction, thus helping the adoption of BWA as a viable alternative or complement to DSL and cable. It will face challenges in terms of spectrum availability and service regulation:

 “3.5GHz remains mostly a band allocated to fixed only services in 77% of the countries surveyed. However the regulators are starting to revise their positions to allow portable services in a first step towards allowing full mobility at 3.5GHz.  In most of Europe 2.5-2.69 GHz band is exclusively reserved for UMTS mobile services and is therefore not available to BWA and WiMAX service providers”, added Adlane Fellah.

 Further, WiMAX will not resolve all problems service providers are facing today and proprietary systems will continue to contribute greatly to BWA’s success, within their niche markets.  Both proprietary and WiMAX compliant systems will continue to improve coverage and penetration limitations but no system can go beyond the laws of physics and every deployment will face different challenges.

 The report provides in-depth analysis of 3GPP technologies, TD-CDMA and 802.20 vs. WiMAX in the mobile space and explains why the next two years will be critical for WiMAX faith.

 The report contains research, analysis and forecasts for point to point and point to multi-point systems derived from interviews of service providers, regulators in fifty countries, 802.16 chipset vendors, WiMAX and proprietary system vendors, as well as large infrastructure suppliers.

 “WiMAX and Broadband Wireless (Sub-11Ghz) Worldwide Market Analysis and Trends 2005-2010” is available now with the Maravedis.