BARCELONA (WiMAX Day). WiMAX was in full throttle at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain this week. The WiMAX industry is growing fast, a fact that was made evident by the number of WiMAX products on display from all the major equipment vendors.

Numerous reports noted that conference delegates were surprised that WiMAX stole the limelight from Long Term Evolution (LTE), the official broadband wireless technology supported by the GSM Association, which was supposed to take center stage.

WiMAX was also prominent in a speech made by Arun Sarin, CEO of Vodafone. Widely regarded as a soothsayer for the telecom industry, Sarin said the two standards should not be at war.

“We should have one standard going forward, rather than dueling standards,” he said. “The old debates around TDMA, CDMA, and GSM weren’t very productive…. So we need to encourage folks to merge WiMAX into LTE.”

It was only one year ago, at the same venue, when Sarin described WiMAX as “an interesting technology that’s not really ready for prime time.” WiMAX is now the leading act in the big top, which prompted Sarin to publicly broker a merger.

But what is the common denominator that might provide for a peaceful co-existence between WiMAX and LTE? According to Rudy Leser, VP of marketing and corporate strategy at WiMAX equipment vendor Alvarion, “seventy to eighty percent of the technologies in LTE and WiMAX are the same.”

In fact, the two technologies “share a lot of the same DNA,” explained Hyam Bolande, Global Director in solutions marketing at Alcatel-Lucent’s Mobile Access Division.

The bulk of this DNA is known as Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), which is the key component that the ITU Radiocommunication Assembly baked into the IMT standard for 4G. OFDMA is the access scheme employed by WiMAX. It is said to be a “working assumption” that OFDMA will be used in the final specifications for LTE.

So why are the WiMAX developers so smug and the GSM/LTE camp still so worried about their lunch?

Time to market seems to be the key point, and LTE is late for the banquet. “Don’t forget that WiMAX is here today, whilst LTE is at least two years away,” said Leser.

Sarin seems to believe that the standard for 4G could become a hybrid of LTE and WiMAX. He said that LTE is very accommodating and that “there is a TDD section that I think WiMAX could fit into.”

Yet it is not clear if it is a friendly merger being proposed, or a hostile takeover.

And not everyone agrees that standards are at issue. According to Gerald Lepkin, a GSM industry veteran, “this is about intellectual property rights, and protecting the installed base of legacy 3G systems.”

Others say that both points are moot, as dual-mode chipsets are being planned, and equipment manufacturers are already are planning to implement platforms that offer both WiMAX and LTE.

Allen Salmasi, CEO of NextWave Wireless, said that NextWave is already “demonstrating [its] strategic capabilities to provide the kind of platform agnostic migration paths that different customer segments require. To us, this is the only way of ensuring that our customers’ investments are also investments to meet tomorrow’s needs, whatever the platform.”

A merger of WiMAX and LTE standards seems unlikely, so they will be left to frolic innocently on a bed of silicon.

In the end, the issue isn’t really about technology, as different companies will use the technology that is right for them. Thus, according to WiMAX Forum President Ron Resnick, “it’s really up to the operators if that’s what they want to do.”