You say it is decided by the carriers, but not every potential player has entered the game yet and those who haven’t could easily go WiMax. What happens if Comcast deides to finally use its WCS licenses and goes with WiMax? What about Bellsouth, who has shown WiMax tendencies? What if Clearwire pulls a Nextel and sudenly grows into a national carrier? What about all the developing countries around the world that are going to go with whichever vendor does the best job of bribing the right officials? This could easily play out into a reversal of the current voice picture, where GSM dominates but CDMA is still thriving. I could imagine a world where the established players are all using Qualcomm/CDMA, but all the up and comers are in the Intel/WiMax camp.

Good points you make. i guess it could go that way, though I do feel that there are some inherent challenges for wimax. i think cdma is also gearing up for a 450 mhz push and we could be seeing some exciting stuff happen in that area/ the reason i say this is because qualcomm is here and now while intel is still talking about wimax.

Just remember that CDMA and GSM were both there (if unproven) when a huge chunk of North and South America decided to go with “TDMA”, mostly at the urging of Ericsson. I think it is a mistake to assume this will be an all or nothing fight. Even if one technology family proves far more popular, the global market is big enough to support multiple standards (Mac, Windows, Unix, anyone).