Russian operator switches to LTE: Yota, a Russian telecom operator, had committed to WiMax, and has 500,000 subscribers in five Russian cities. It's switching to LTE for new deployments in 15 cities, and will migrate subscribers to LTE in existing WiMax-deployed locations.
Monica Paolini, the principal at Senza Fili, wrote that this wasn't unexpected, but the timing was sooner than anticipated. She points to an interview with Kommersant in which Yota's head says that LTE as a technology choice has more to do with a somewhat faster technology, and switching to a multi-vendor approach.
This announcement comes not long after Clearwire said that it would consider LTE in the future, a statement it reiterated today.
WiMax may turn out to be an interim technology, deployed because of particular advantages of timing, along with flexibility in encoding, channel widths, and bands. It's too early to say whether it's headed for the bin.
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