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Does the ITU know something about WiMAX...?

The waters around what the successor to 3G is have just become a tad murkier. Last week, we wrote about the woes of the mobile telcos and the companies supplying them with equipment.

WiMax, heavily touted by Intel as the foundation for the next generation of high-speed mobile networks, might not be the right horse to gamble on, we said. We said that the mobile operators would do better to stick to their knitting and incrementally improve existing 3G networks, rather than jumping ship onto new technologies.

And this week? No sooner were the words of last week’s column published than the ITU, the international telecoms union, decided formally to adopt WiMax as a 3G standard.

So what does that change? On the face of it not much. This move was trailed at a meeting of the ITU in May. And the fact remains, as those within the 3G camp are wont to remind us, that WiMax has similar throughput for a given power output, bandwidth and frequency as HSDPA. According to one observer, it's no better and could be a lot worse for carrier-grade communications because it doesn't have the quality of service standardisation that 3G does.

The fact remains however, that the ITU’s decision now means that WiMax is more likely to get a chunk of a valuable and scarce resource, namely radio spectrum.

But even if it shares the 3G range of spectrum, one commentator was prompted to point out that opposition to WiMax won’t abate, and the terms of the ITU's approval may leave WiMax crammed into a smaller band of spectrum than its rivals.

The mobile operators will still get the lion’s share of whatever additional spectrum is allocated for whatever succeeds 3G, so we’re prepared to stick to our conclusion-- even if Intel’s hefty clout is on the other end of the scale.

For the moment anyway...