WiMAX started off as a big opportunity few years back and was expected to satisfy the needs of consumers who sought high-speed wireless broadband access. But over these few years, the technology is yet to witness rapid adoption from the operator community and it now faces a situation where it will have to compete with technologies such as LTE without making most of the early-mover advantage.

The challenges faced by the technology are multifold.

China, the largest market for wireless services is against opening up for the adoption of the technology. The country is rather pushing its indigenously developed TD-SCDMA standard. "The fact that China has not supported WiMAX, preferring instead to back the homegrown TD-SCDMA 3G standard, is particularly unnerving for the technology's prospects in the region," says Shaker Amin, Industry Analyst, Frost & Sullivan.

Moreover the other barriers include regulatory issues, weak operator support in some countries, high CPE prices and competition from HSPA/LTE which collectively result in dismal adoption rate of WiMAX in the Asia-Pacific region.

"Some large Asian markets have made very little progress in licensing WiMAX, while other markets such as Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore have seen considerable growth in wireless broadband subscribers using HSPA data cards and dongles,” says Amin.

"With HSPA gaining momentum and LTE on the horizon, governments and operators must act quickly to take advantage of the features that mobile WiMAX technology can offer today," adds Amin. "We believe that the key focus of WiMAX will be to provide basic data connectivity in underserved markets at around the 1Mbps level, and as a precursor or complement to HSPA and LTE technologies where spectrum is scarce."

However the opportunity for WiMAX still exists big time as 3.6 billion people in the region are yet to have first-time access to broadband services. Amin estimates the market size for WiMAX in APAC to be worth $ 6.4 billion by 2014 with companies such as Japan’s KDDI, Korea Telecom and Indian firms such as Tata Communications as well as Reliance Communications investing in the technology.

"Competition does exist from 3G and regulation will remain a challenge in some countries, but overall, we believe WiMAX can be deployed as an effective technology to connect people who will never realistically receive fixed-line or other wireless broadband services," concludes Amin.