For those accustomed to a wireless interface, WiMAX (News - Alert) has long been the technology providing wireless transmission of data through a variety of transmission modes. Now, as the world of telecommunications is swiftly moving toward Long Term Evolution (LTE (News - Alert)) to adopt 4G mobile communications technology, a perceived battle between WiMAX and LTE could easily emerge.

The reality however, is that at times, WiMAX will actually serve as the stepping stone to LTE. This is possible due to the fact that the radio element of the two technologies is very similar and both use similar hardware and infrastructures. With these glaring similarities, wouldn’t it be simple to migrate a fully functioning WiMAX network to LTE?

Many WiMAX hardware manufacturers are already making this claim to help stabilize their position in the market with the looming changes on the horizon. This flexibility lends to driving greater adoption of LTE as the price of hardware weighs more heavily than the software in new technology rollouts.

As a result, operators can opt to load WiMAX now in strategic, targeted instances, safe in the knowledge that they can migrate those network components to LTE later. For those operators who have already made significant investments in WiMAX technologies, they can maximize those investments without having to make major changes to the capital intensive segment of their networks.

At the same time, there are a number of early adopters who have had WiMAX technology for wireless broadband service for a number of years. Industry experts anticipate that there will be a mass crossover to LTE when the cost of buying and servicing a network equipment becomes cheaper than WiMAX, driven by higher volume coming from the LTE hardware manufacturing camp.

An example of this potential in the market is a proposed investment by Verizon. If Verizon (News - Alert) makes the plunge to invest billions of dollars to truly deploy LTE across the U.S., that deployment alone will bring down the cost of LTE to the rest of the world due to large volumes. The same dynamic will occur in Japan. A quick study on Europe and none of the major operators are going anywhere near WiMAX, except for very specific situations, indicating that LTE implementations are on the way.

With the availability of volume purchasing, there will be a great deal of pressure put on WiMAX operators who are currently competing with LTE operators in the same market where OPEX (News - Alert) costs will be significantly different. The industry is not yet at the tipping point, but with major carriers moving in this direction, LTE costs will have no where to go but down.

But even as carriers are getting excited about the possibilities inherent in LTE and 4G network technologies, the widespread availability of this innovation is still six to eight years away, at least. Conservative estimates put roughly 80 percent of mobile broadband subscriptions being 3G-enabled in the year 2013, with more than one billion subs on a variation of HSPA and nearly 300 million on an EV-DO variation. At present, reports from Wireless Intelligence and CDG show there are only 780+ million worldwide 3G subscribers.

All in all, it could be the latter half of the next decade before you can expect to see 4G technology eclipse 3G in terms of mass adoption. As a result, it is important for operators to start planning now, yet can be flexible in their approach to adoption. The fact that WiMAX technologies can easily migrate to 4G when the time comes will ease the financial and technological burden so that services are never interrupted and the experience remains a consistently positive one.