The LTE versus WiMax debate won’t be silenced, but there’s really just one question that needs to be answered. Does LTE offer a more natural evolution path than WiMax for existing 3G players? If it does, WiMax will struggle to ever get the support it needs to become a mass-market offer, even with its time-to-market advantage.

The fact that more 3G operators are coming out of the woodwork and backing LTE suggests there is some commonality, but Intel – the daddy of WiMax – continues to insist LTE is an entirely different technology.

I put this point to Jeanette Fridberg, head of product marketing for chief LTE backer Ericsson, earlier today. Fridberg accepts that LTE cannot re-use 3G radio technology or base stations, and has no advantage over WiMax in that respect (it is, in fact, based on the same air interface as WiMax). But she says LTE can be deployed at 3G base station sites, which account for up to 80% of the capital expenditure.

So what’s to stop an operator from deploying WiMax at 3G sites? Not much, apparently, except that WiMax base stations provide less coverage than LTE and 3G ones. That means a 3G operator rolling out WiMax would have to build more sites to fill the gaps in coverage, which could be not only costly but also inefficient, leaving it with sites that overlap in coverage.

The unresolved question is how much of this coverage advantage stems from LTE’s reliance on FDD technology, as opposed to the TDD used by WiMax (FDD uses two spectrum channels, one for sending information and one for receiving it, while TDD uses a single channel for both). If an FDD version of WiMax would level the playing field then Ericsson will have to be on its toes. Supporters of WiMax say they are working on an FDD system now.