Archive for December 24th, 2007

WiMAX Potential In Next 5 Years

Published by Babar Bhatti on December 24, 2007 under Broadband Internet, ICT, Information Technology, Infrastructure, Wimax

Article from Taiwan about the potential growth of WiMAX in coming years. Full story here. This is in the context of rapid overall growth of the information and communications technology (ICT) market in the Asia-Pacific region. The spending will reach US$154 billion in 2008, up 10% over 2007, with China and India together contributing about half of the spending, according to a prediction by ICD.

With companies of worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) network to start building related hardware next year, the new network technology is expected to bring huge business potential worth US$25 billion worldwide in next five years, according to Market Intelligence Center (MIC), a market survey institute for the sector making ICT (information and communication technology) products.

Also, Topology Research Institute (TRI) opined that market demand for mobile WiMAX network will start growing in 2008 and sharply increase in 2009. In 2011, registered users of the network are estimated at 30 million persons all around the world.

MIC noted that starting this year through 2010, the U.S. plans to invest US$5 billion, the largest amount in the world, in constructing WiMAX network, with Taiwan and Korea to respectively pour US$1 billion and US$900 million in that. After bidding for WiMAX licenses, bid winners in Japan are also expected to funnel a total of US$3.8 billion into building WiMAX.

In fact, development of WiMAX technology is different among developed and emerging countries, with the U.S. tending to focus on integrated products based on the technology, and India, the Middle East and Pakistan on fixed WiMAX initially to make up their penetration rates of broadband network.