A senior executive at Intel – WiMAX’s most prominent backer – has called for the mobile industry to unify two competing future mobile standards, WiMAX and Long Term Evolution (LTE). “In our view they ought to be harmonised,” Sean Maloney, head of sales and marketing at Intel, told the BBC, adding that Intel was “actively looking” at harmonisation. Maloney described the two technologies as being “about 80 percent similar” with the main difference being that WiMAX is a few years ahead in terms of development. “LTE is still a little way away; as it starts to show up we will be looking to see how we can harmonise with it,” he added. However, he said that Intel had no plans underway to produce a dual WiMAX/LTE chip but that it “would certainly be a nice long-term goal.”

Maloney’s comments echo those made by outgoing Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year. “We don’t want duel standards; this has proved unproductive in the past, and we want to encourage the inclusion or merging of WiMAX into LTE,” Sarin said in his keynote speech. Today’s BBC report notes that some mobile companies are currently trialling both technologies. It gives the example of Vodafone, which is trialling WiMAX in Greece and Malta while its part-owned US subsidiary Verizon Wireless is looking at LTE.