And the nascent 802.16m standard, once it matures, is expected to increase the proportion of mobile Wimax networks.
But not everybody believes that the future of mobile Wimax will be so rosy. A recent report commissioned by Wimax and LTE vendor Eden Rock Communications found that operators should follow an LTE upgrade path rather than heading toward 802.16m.
This applies to both established operators looking to jump from 3G to a 4G standard, and greenfield operators rolling out Wimax networks of either stripe.
"Eden Rock believes that small greenfield operators should continue to deploy Wimax 'e' in the short-to-mid term but should migrate in the longer term to LTE instead of 802.16m," president Chaz Immendorf said.
The company noted in a recent research report that LTE has several advantages, including a larger developer ecosystem and several technology advantages.
On the surface, the 802.16m standard shares many similarities to LTE - it allows for larger spectrum allocations (up to 100 MHz) and the use of higher order MIMO schemes. The specifications allocate many of the same spectrum bands.
But the standardization process for 802.16m is already on the decline, in a process that does not bode well for the future of the standard, the report states.