Paper, magazines and blogs have been talking about the upcoming wave of WiMax and other wireless broadband services. These new technologies are fast, but analysts do not think that any of them will offset 3G.

3G is increasingly being rolled out by cellular operators in Europe and North America. It promises to deliver average data speeds of about 400K bps to 700K bps. While the WiMax Forum predicts that mobile users will receive at least 1M bps from WiMax (for fixed devices, downlink data rates of up to 65 M bps at close range to 16 M bps at distances of 9 to 10 km), its coverage will be limited for the next three to four years and will merely supplement 3G offerings. It is possible that 3G, WiMax and other wireless broadband technologies will converge into a future 4G offering.

Some of these additional technologies include FLASH-OFDM (Fast Low-latency Access with Seamless Handoff-Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing) and UMTS TD-CDMA (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System Time-Division Code Division Multiple Access), but others exist. For a good overview of the area, Infoworld is running a good overview.

With the recent announcement of Japan and China collaborating on 4G and Sprint Nextel having a license for 80% coverage of the 2.5Ghz frequency range, this should continue to be an interesting area to watch.