The nature of the ICT industry is such that vendors have often pitted their technologies and/or marketing strategies against one another in a bid to sway customers toward their offerings and away from those of their competitors. Such appears to be the case with the battle for dominance of the mobile broadband market.

The two protagonists are LTE and WiMax. LTE, or Long Term Evolution, is a wireless broadband technology developed by means of a collaboration between groups of telecommunications associations called the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The 3GPP is essentially a group that represents the interests of mobile operators from around the planet and, importantly, the equipment vendors they depend upon.