At the Wireless Innovation Conference yesterday, Qualcomm's EVP and group president Len Lauer, who previously served as Sprint's COO, said WiMAX is not only more expensive to deploy than cellular networks, but it also doesn't provide anymore bandwidth than cellular. Lauer said: "On the down link [WCDMA] can run 2 to 4 to 6 to 8 mb per second and that is similar to what we are getting with cable modems throughout the world. It's an assertion that WiMAX can only deliver these speeds, and you can't do that with WCDMA and CDMA. In fact you can." Lauer also points to reports of bad reviews of South Korea's WiMAX network: "If you look at it now in South Korea there are a number of press articles written that the results are very disappointing, they only have a few thousand users. But if you look at CDMA or WCDMA where there are hundreds of thousands to millions of users." The remarks surprised some industry pundits because Qualcomm just recently acquired the mobile WiMAX assets of TeleCIS.
For more on Lauer's anti-WiMAX talk:
- check out this GigaOM article