9/23/2008 -- Don't look for the United States to be a leader in WiMAX deployments, in spite of the best-laid plans of several prominent U.S. municipalities (and a bet-the-business-on-WiMAX strategy from Sprint-Nextel).

Instead, other geographical regions -- principally, Asia-Pacific -- are taking the lead when it comes to WiMAX, India foremost among them. One upshot of this, according to technology watcher Infonetics Research, is that the Indian subcontinent is shaping up to be the epicenter of WiMAX activity.

"WiMAX has gained such momentum across so many regions that it is no longer sensible to suggest that WiMAX growth will be flattened by the emergence of LTE in the next few years," said Richard Webb, directing analyst with Infonetics, in a statement. "In populous countries with poor national telecom infrastructure, such as India, Brazil and Africa, there is a lack of broadband services, and even of basic voice services, which is a significant driver for WiMAX adoption. In many developing countries, with India being the prime example, WiMAX is showing promising signs of becoming the primary broadband infrastructure and a prominent 3G mobile technology. India is absolutely critical to the fortunes of WiMAX, and the level of uptake there will help decide how prominent a position 802.16e takes in the overall wireless landscape in the next decade."

That's one reason why the United States, Western Europe and other established economies continue to drag their feet on WiMAX. After India, according to Infonetics, the most ambitious WiMAX adopters will be Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Brazil.

For example, according to Infonetics, the number of Brazilian mobile WiMAX adopters is set to explode, rocketing from less than 1,000 last year to 3.6 million in 2011. For the arithmetically-challenged, that's a compound annual growth rate of 940 percent. Meanwhile, fixed WiMAX deployments are surging in Russia, where demand for broadband connectivity exceeds the availability of DSL service.

If established economies have any role to play in the growing WiMAX sweepstakes, it's on the convergence tip. Japan, for example, could spearhead the drive toward converged mobile WiMAX-LTE services. --Stephen Swoyer