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Who Will Truly Provide WiMAX?
With all the hype surrounding WiMAX as each year passes, the general question that looms over peoples minds are who will actually provide WiMAX? This is an excellent question. Customers, businesses and enterprises can hope to receive some form of WiMAX services from the legacy carriers . Companies like Sprint/Nextel in the US would eventually be providing WiMAX services at some point in time.
Even though large telco's represent a major chunk of the customer base, they do not encompass the entire customer pie of subscribers. According to a London based research report by ARCChart, the majority (60%) of subscribers are held by small to mid-size companies. Unfortunately, these small companies have less than 5000 subscribers and not enough to actually make an impact on WiMAX development. According to the report, only 20% of the entire subscriber pie is held by companies like Clearwire who acquired spectrum earl in its development.
This means that these small to medium enterprises will either have to increase their subscriber base or risk being eaten up by the legacy carriers who are aggressively planning national roll outs.
Zain Y. Shah
