IT and telecoms analyst ABI Research believes that the phoney war has ended in the battle to be the de facto standard for the next generation of wireless networks with WiMAX gaining traction over a slowly emerging LTE.

In its report "Wireless Spectrum, Services and Technology Deployment Market Data"  ABI recognised TeliaSonera's first commercial launch of LTE networks and believes that 2010 will see the commercial launch of several LTE networks, including large operators such as Verizon Wireless in the United States and NTT DoCoMo in Japan. Yet with voice standards still in development and a lack of compatible handsets, ABI cautions that these early implementations will likely carry only data traffic for some time to come.

Yet as LTE deployments begin to pick up pace, ABI sees WiMAX continuing steady progress. Several operators, including Sprint in the United States, have chosen to go with WiMAX as their 4G network of choice and ABI has identified 164 mobile WiMAX networks in trial or commercial operation at the end of 2009, compared to just over 100 LTE trials.

In addition, the total number of network contract announcements for mobile WiMAX tracked by ABI research was 242, compared to only 38 for LTE. With the planned launch of several WiMAX devices in 2010, including handsets from smartphone maker HTC, ABI expects that it will be likely that technology will co-exist with LTE for some time to come.

Commented ABI Research analyst Bhavya Khanna, "While LTE does promise data speeds greater than 50 Mbps, they have yet to be achieved by live or trial networks, whereas mobile WiMAX is now a tried and tested standard."