While Verizon Wireless and AT&T are busy with their plans for LTE, the WiMAX Forum likes to point out that WiMAX is a reality around the globe.

“One of the strengths of WiMAX is that deployment has been happening on a large scale on all the continents in 114 countries … Many of the emerging countries are beginning to realize that broadband availability is going to be critical to national growth,” says Mohammed Shakouri, acting president of the WiMAX Forum and corporate vice president of Alvarion.

Shakouri says the largest numbers of WiMAX deployments right now are happening throughout Africa, and there’s considerable growth in India, Eastern Europe and Indonesia.

Julien Blin, founder of JBB Research, says that cheap deployment and licensing costs are the main reason for WiMAX’s popularity in places like Africa. “Africa just doesn’t have the money to buy 3G licenses. A WiMAX license might set you back one hundred, maybe two hundred thousand. On the other hand, a 3G license may cost as much as 1 or 2 billion Euros,” Blin says.

“WiMAX is the perfect technology for places like Africa, where there’s more people surfing the Web on their cell phones than on their PCs. The reason is because of the lack of infrastructure, and WiMAX is perfectly suited for this kind of market,” Blin adds.

Blin refers to numbers released by Opera that show mobile Web adoption in Nigeria has increased by 1,000 percent year-over-year. “They use their cell phones for pretty much everything because few people have the money to buy a PC,” Blin says.

A July report by Juniper Research projects 50 million WiMAX subscribers worldwide by 2014. The report shows that while emerging markets will account for a decent share of revenues by 2014 – with Africa alone accounting for 15 percent of total revenues – North America will take the lion’s share, at $4 billion of a total of just under $16 billion in revenue by 2014.

The WiMAX Forum reports that the Yota WiMax network in Russia registered 1,300 new subscribers per day in June, with average downloads of 10GB per user per month. “Broadband is addictive. The more they give people broadband, the more people want to use it," Shakouri says.

But it’s not just its existing deployments that count as strengths for the WiMAX camp. The technology also has managed a competitive components market. "I think that one advantage of the WiMAX ecosystem is coming from the Taiwanese Internet industry, we are seeing a significantly lower cost for components and devices," Shakouri says.

Shakouri adds that while interest in commercial applications such as public transportation and video surveillance are widespread, voice is simply not a priority right now. “Voice is an important aspect of WiMAX, but WiMAX is … not a looked at as a cheaper 2G technology. It's being looked at as a mulitmedia channel,” he says, noting that focus on voice is a possibility once WiMAX has sufficiently matured.

Blin agrees. “I think voice is definitely a possibility, but the majority of deployments are going to be used as a replacement to high-speed broadband Internet.”

As the wireless industry seems bent on continually relearning the merits of openness, WiMAX was born on a philosophy of openness. “People realize this is the Internet model of business, this is the open model. You see such momentum. I think that's why you see some of these companies in 3G bad-mouthing WiMAX, because they just don't want competition."

But while WiMAX is affordable enough that it can be embraced by smaller players in emerging markets, the technology has not been ignored by larger entities looking to expand their reach. Current carriers include but are not limited to the likes of Orange, Sprint Nextel and Vodacom, while equipment suppliers include Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, Cisco, SR Telecom and Alvarion.

Although WiMAX’s present use case and business model leans heavily on emerging markets, Sprint Nextel, Clearwire and their partners are working to ensure it will have a life in the United States. And while the LTE camp shouts the possibilities of its chosen technology from the mountaintops, the WiMAX camp is content to quietly rack up real-world subscribers.