A Parks Associates research report predicts that there will be 7 million global WiMAX users by 2009. A few news outlets have picked up on this study as a sign that WiMAX is lagging, but I don’t completely agree. Compared with the roughly one billion global cellular users today, 7 million is indeed small change. But keep in mind that there is no WiMAX gear on the market as of today. And the gear that will first be available will be designed for fixed wireless deployments only, such as unwiring homes and offices. The WiMAX scenario that promises to compete with cellular networks won’t actually hit the market until 2006, when Intel says it will be embedding WiMAX within laptops.

The first few years of any technology are almost always guaranteed to be slow. Wi-Fi was hardly explosive in the first few years of its existence, and look where it is today. But because WiMAX has been so heavily promoted and is so poorly understood, I suspect we’re going to see many more articles that talk about the “failure” of WiMAX. However, reports of WiMAX’s death over the next few years is premature.