Infonetics Research is calling for a 4.9 billion dollar (US) market in WiMAX equipment worldwide by 2013.

With the overall WiMAX market growing 12%, to $255M USD, Infonetics feels that WiMAX has weathered the bottoming of the tech slowdown, showing notable growth in India and the United States.

The U.S., in fact, will be one of the tougher markets for WiMAX to penetrate. “Mature” markets like the U.S. and Europe have well established internet infrastructures, even if the U.S.’ infrastructure is decades behind everyone else. A new service that will have difficulty being price competitive and require new hardware (compared to WiFi & Ethernet) will have trouble penetrating the massive monopolies of cable and DSL networks.

WiMAX’s chance to shine will be in developing companies, aka emerging markets, where the customers are more open to alternatives and existing infrastructures aren’t as strongly rooted or are more expensive.

Source: [DigiTimes]