The eOK .network

This week at the WiMax Forum Congress Asia in Singapore, SingTel’s CEO Allan Lew mentioned plans for a 40Mbps nationwide wireless boradband network in two years.

Considering I only have a 2Mpbs cable connection at home, HSDPA only at 3.6Mbps at max while on the go, and Wireless@SG is unreliable at best, the 40Mbps pervasive wireless network is most welcome.

In layman speak, for what some people call a 4G network, there are basically two very similar technologies that make sense here: 3G Long-term evolution (LTE) and WiMax. Both are very similar in design and pretty much serve the same purpose. So what will it be for Singapore?

I for one had my hopes up for WiMax since SingTel was already running mobile WiMax trials and Allan Lew did make the announcement above at WiMax Fourm, but it appears that WiMax may not be the ideal technology for a country like Singapore.

According to GigaOm:

Fred Wright, an SVP that handles 4G networks for Motorola, believes LTE will be the standard chosen by 80 percent of the carriers in the world — good news for vendors such as such as Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson, who have opted to stick with LTE. Of course, as GSM is the dominant mobile standard today, such a prediction isn’t all that surprising.

In my opinion, mobile broadband services such as HSDPA have beat Wireless@SG’s sporadic metro WiFi as the connection of choice and going the 3G LTE route is an obvious upgrade for the operators instead of WiMax.

Other commentators also believe 3G LTE is better suited for mature markets (like Singapore) and WiMax for rural/emerging markets where no GSM infrastructure is in place. WiMax is a great technology because it can serve as back haul as well as access making it ideal for countries with larger landmass and huge rural populations.

But coming back to savvy Singapore, the rate of adoption is highly reliant on the availability of the end point devices. If Intel keeps to its promise and starts shipping all Centrino 2 Notebooks with WiMax this year, will users shy away from ugly LTE dongles/PC cards?

In a perfect world, I’d want both. Maybe different operators running different networks? But that’s unlikely.