Since the start-up of 3G era, Mobile Internet has become the major propeller for the development of wireless broadband access network, while the mobile Internet and broadband mobile communication network have brought essential changes to the structure of the global communication industry. From the continuous upgrades of 3G networks to deployment of HSPA/HSPA+, and to the gradual popularization of WiMAX and LTE commercial networks, the network capacity and data transmission rate are both regarded as one of the important indexes to evaluate a specific technique, and the operators are faced with huge pressure on capacity expansion in the construction and optimization of the network. With the diversification of mobile broadband applications, a great amount of mobile data employs more and more network resource, especially when the development of mobile broadband media stream services places huge pressure on the network capacity. Obviously, the upgrade and optimization of the current 3G network can no longer meet the users¡¯ requirements on data applications, so it is quite necessary to evolve to the next generation mobile communication network which takes OFDM and MIMO as the core techniques.
   
 As the most representative evolving technologies of the next generation mobile communication network, WiMAX and LTE have been competing with each other. The former, initiated earlier, has built scaled commercial networks in some countries and regions, while the latter, though started late, has widely accepted by the major operators and is rapidly expanding the commercial network coverage. Since the first LTE network was put into operation in North Europe in December of 2009, members from WiMAX industry diverged seriously. For example, Yoya, the largest Russian WiMAX operator turned to LTE; Alvarion announced the launch of TD-LTE platform; Intel, the greatest WiMAX supporter announced the dissolution of its WiMAX project sector; Motorola released the solution evolving from 802.16e/802.16e Enhanced to LTE. All the above accelerated the differentiation of WiMAX camp.

TD-LTE technology is the major rival of WiMAX, since they both adopt unipath TDM and are quite attractive to the non-symmetric operators. If TD-LTE technology is proved successful, some WiMAX operators may directly turn to TD-LTE camp. In addition, TD-LTE has been dominated by China so that WiMAX has rare opportunities to be developed in the global largest mobile communication market. The successful operation of the first TD-LTE network in Shanghai EXPO Park demonstrated well performance capacity of TD-LTE networks, and Qualcomm wins the 2.3GHz band bid accelerated the internationalization of TD-LTE. Though WiMAX still occupies part of the mobile communication market, the prospect in long term will remain gloomy.