Is a merger of LTE and Wimax, the two contesting standards for 4G, do-able or desirable? The question has been has resurrected by Intel after it was originally proposed last year by Arun Sarin. CEO of Vodafone, that the two 4G standards should be combined.

Sarin proposed the idea at last year’s Mobile World Congress and repeated it at this year’s event. "We should have one standard going forward, rather than duelling standards," said Sarin, "the old debates around TDMA, CDMA, and GSM weren’t very productive. So we need to encourage folks to merge WiMAX into LTE."

Rupert Baines, vice president of marketing at PicoChip, reckoned: "Technically, it is quite feasible: both are OFDMA in DL, both support up to 20MHz TDD & FDD, similar MIMO structures both are IP-based etc. While LTE has far faster frames, this is one of the things "To Do" in 16m; while the uplink is different you could add a compatible mode. There are some significant differences, but nothing you could not bridge if you wanted to: for example, 16m and Release 9 having both backwards compatibility and a unified mode."

Baines added that besides the issue of do-ability there’s an issue of desirability.

"Whether it is desirable depends on a balance of two things", said Baines, "having competition between standards drives innovation and choice but having a unified standard drives economies of scale - which matters more? I think that the merger would be good: increased volume, reduced price more competition within a standard, more innovation and lower prices in a virtuous circle."

Baines’ conclusion is: "Technically they could easily merge - but politically or emotionally I really doubt it. Too many people have invested too much for anyone to be able to make it happen."

Intel is ‘actively looking’ at harmonisation of Wimax and 4G, according to Sean Maloney, the company’s chief sales and marketing officer, who said it was technically possible that the chipset Intel is introducing later this year to cover WiFi and Wimax, could also be used for LTE, although he added: "We don’t have any plans to do that yet."

Even if harmonisation is do-able and desirable, it still may not happen because of Rene Penning de Vries, CEO of NXP, said: "It would be great for the industry, and the world, to have one standard," but he warned: "As we’ve seen in the battles in other domains, it’s not easy to get one standard."

He reckoned the LTE-Wimax battle would be fought on three issues: politics, the ability to re-use the baseband infrastructure because of the massive investments in it, and spectrum efficiency.

"But I doubt if the deciding element will be spectrum efficiency," said de Vries.