Shipments of mobile WiMAX chipsets will reach 4 million by the end of 2009 according to the latest research by Maravedis, carried out in partnership with Reveal Wireless.

Maravedis and Reveal Wireless found that the WiMAX subscriber station chipset ecosystem is acutely fragmented, with more than 14 chipset vendors competing for market share. "This puts pressure on vendors with insufficient customer traction, lacking funding or scale, or offering only partial chipset solutions," said Adlane Fellah, Maravedis CEO and Founder and co-author of the report.

Several early movers that entered the WiMAX market with fixed or Wave1 mobile solutions are now shipping Wave2 compliant chipsets, mainly composed of a base-band chip and a companion RF transceiver IC. "However, most of the available chipsets are not highly optimized because they were compelled to cover a broad range of application segments," noted Pascal Deriot, Senior Analyst and co-author of the report.

"We believe that WiMAX mass market adoption requires ubiquitous coverage and IOT mature, sub US$10 chipsets that are power and performance optimized for each application-specific segment," he added.

The report also concluded that the WiMAX market is not large enough to support 14 chipset vendors. Consolidations, exits and transitions toward LTE are expected in the next two years.