4G World: LTE Climbs on WiMax's Shoulders

CHICAGO --- 4G World -- This young wireless broadband event could be considered a showdown between Long Term Evolution (LTE) and the slightly older mobile WiMax standard.

What is striking, however, about some of the news coming on the eve of the show is how some companies are building on what they have already done with WiMax as the market moves towards LTE in 2010 and beyond.

In particular, Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT) and chipmaker Sequans Communications are showing off LTE technology that builds on their WiMax know-how.

Sequans is unveiling the LTE program that it has been working on at the show. The firm says that it will demonstrate its "first LTE solutions beginning early 2010, in support of pre-commercial operator trials." (See Sequans Powers WiMax Dongles.)

Motorola, meanwhile, has been building on its WiMax base stations with LTE for a while. The vendor has shown off small live LTE networks at several shows recently because it developed its latest base stations on the platform it used for WiMax. (See Moto Shows Off LTE.) LTE is actually based on Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) -- the same radio technology as WiMax -- so naturally, vendors that have already worked on WiMax gear get to reuse some of their R&D. (See LTE: The Big Freeze.)

Motorola will be showing off both LTE and WiMax here. The vendor is promoting the concept of a self-organizing LTE network at the show.

— Dan Jones, Site Editor, Unstrung