Technical capabilities be damned, WiMAX is here first and LTE might as well not bother.  That’s pretty much been the message from Sprint this week, whose representative at the WiMAX Forum Asia has been talking up the company’s gradually emerging next-gen network.  Teresa Kellett, Sprint’s director of global development, compared the upcoming battle between LTE and WiMAX to the ongoing GSM/CDMA divide, suggesting that GSM had secured its global dominance by virtue of being first to market.  Ironically, Sprint themselves are a CDMA network.

“The head start a technology has is the key differentiator” Teresa Kellett, director of global development, Sprint Nextel

Meanwhile Intel – who have been a key investor in WiMAX – sent along their representative to talk up the possibility of WiMAX and LTE co-existing happily, or even collaborating with each other.  Somewhat bizarrely, Garth Collier, managing director of Intel’s WiMAX division in Asia-Pacific and Japan decided he was “seeing for the first time a convergence in the cellular industry”; obviously he’s not been paying much attention to AT&T and Verizon both resolutely ignoring WiMAX and setting their LTE stalls out.

Frankly, Kellett’s emphasis on the importance of being first to get your network rolling isn’t new.  We’ve been saying for a while now that Sprint should really concentrate on getting a national WiMAX service up and running.  However the issue for the carrier isn’t one of vanquishing its LTE rivals, it’s a case of not disappearing down the pan, massive WiMAX investment be damned.