Not if you consider the footprint and scalability of legacy mobile systems, says Peter Jarich, a senior analyst at Current Analysis in the US.

Jarich closely follows the debate over the standards known as HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) and fixed, as well as mobile, WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access).

"There is a lot of talk about inherent cost-efficiencies with WiMAX because it will have an open standard," he says. "But I think that as much as that argument may hold water, the ultimate driver is not going to be intellectual property, it's going to be scale.

"The scale you get with HSPA and the 3G ecosystem will really help deliver cost-efficiencies. I think that is the benefit of HSPA - at least in the medium-term."

HSPA is enabled by a simple software upgrade to a WCDMA network. So far, it has boosted bandwidth in 100 WCDMA networks worldwide.

Much of the interest in WiMAX today has to do with spectrum. Some operators are looking to this new standard as a way to deploy next-generation mobile services in the precious 2.5GHz and 3.5GHz spectrum bands.

But a recent study by Arthur D. Little, a US-based management consultancy firm, concluded that WiMAX will remain a niche technology within the wireless access market, capturing just 10 percent of global subscribers by 2012.

One impediment for WiMAX is that it will, at least initially, lack economy of scale. That will make it difficult for WiMAX providers to offer a broad variety of inexpensive mobile phones, Arthur D. Little reported.

Another hurdle for WiMAX to overcome is initial high capital expenditure. Unlike operators that upgrade their established networks with HSPA, WiMAX operators have to build more cell sites to ensure coverage, the study found.

Another strength of HSPA is that it provides global roaming over GSM/WCDMA networks, as well as wide area coverage within many countries.

"WiMAX will depend on a hard handoff from the start," Jarich says, referring to the fact that WiMAX callers may lose their signal as they travel from one area to another.

"So will mobility be seamless from day one? Probably not," Jarich says. "That will make it a little harder to provide voice services with WiMAX. It will take some thinking to resolve such problems."

One major advantage with the world-leading GSM/WCDMA standard is that operators in developing markets can benefit from gradual enhancements to their existing cellular networks, says John Gagnerud, product marketing manager at Ericsson.

"We should never forget the strengths of GSM, which today covers 80 percent of the population," Gagnerud says. "With a small additional investment, operators can add a very decent data service over GPRS/EDGE, with full mobility and roaming. And when more bandwidth is needed, it is easy to build out capacity with HSPA."

This month, Ericsson announced that a newly developed software upgrade dubbed EDGE Evolution will triple data speeds in GSM networks by 2009.

Indeed, HSPA is evolving to even higher speeds and capacity. Within a few years, MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) will increase peak speeds to 42Mbps in the downlink, and 12Mbps in the uplink.