In a major blow to WiMax proponents, Yota, one of the world’s top WiMAX operators serving five Russian cities, said Friday that it decided to develop LTE, not WiMAX, reports the Moscow Times.

Yota is one the largest WiMAX network in the world, says Wikipedia. As of 2010, Yota had 350,000 subscribers, increasing by 3,000 customers per day.

Yota now plans to spend $100 million on an LTE rollout in five Russian cities this year. Their total investments is estimated at up to $2 billion.

The first city to get LTE will be Kazan, followed by Novosibirsk and Samara. Yota plans to launch LTE in Moscow and St. Petersburg at the end of 2011.

The company, founded in 2007, currently operates in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Ufa, Sochi and Krasnodar. It is also active in Belarus, Peru and Nicaragua.

Yota had planned to launch WiMax in 15 more Russian cities, which will instead receive LTE service. The company will use the same 2.5-2.7 GHz frequency band in which its WiMax networks currently operate.

“Yota is a services company; for us technology is an instrument. It’s clear that the LTE standard is becoming the main trend in wireless communications,” chief executive Denis Sverdlov said a statement on the company’s web site.

According to Robert Syputa, senior strategic analyst with Maravedis, “The decline of growth in WiMAX and shift to tier one suppliers who are prepared for a transition to LTE as it becomes widely available now signals a rapid deterioration in WiMAX and its chances of achieving mainstream market momentum. It remains to be seen if WiMAX momentum will continue in India and North America. We now forecast that Clearwire will shift at least part of their deployments to LTE by the end of 2011.”

Samsung provides WiMAX base stations to Yota in Nicaragua and Belarus. Yota also has strategic partnerships with Intel, HTC, Cisco, Sequans and ASUS. Samsung’s U-RAS Flexible base stations can be used as a common platform for Mobile WiMAX (802.16e), Mobile WiMAX 2 (802.16m), as well as both FDD-LTE and TD-LTE deployments.

The Yota LTE plan will likely throw a monkey wrench into Clear’s roaming agreement with the big three WiMAX operators, Yota (in Russia), UQ (in Japan) and Clear (in the United States).

Deployed WiMAX networks include:.

• Clearwire, founded by cellular phone pioneer Craig McCaw in October 2003, continues to expect to cover up to 120 million people with its 4G network by the end of 2010. It ended the first quarter of 2010 with 971,000 total subscribers.
• Korea Telecom now covers more than half of the Korean population. KT launched the world’s first commercial Mobile WiMAX system in South Korea, June 2006.
• Japan’s UQ Communications now covers more than half of Japan’s population, offering services to consumers via more than 20 MVNO partners.
• Malaysia’s Packet One Networks, which celebrated its first anniversary of operations this year, has reached 130,000 subscribers.
• Freedom4 received the green light to offer fully mobile WiMAX services in the UK using its nationwide 3.6GHz spectrum, but big growth is expected after the 2.6 GHz auction.
• Wateen launched Pakistan’s huge WiMAX network covering 22 cities.

4GCounts reported 4.73 million BWA/WiMAX subscribers being served by over 200 operators worldwide at the end of Q3 2009.

The WiMAX Forum says that emerging markets such as India and China are its best bet. But India’s Broadband Auction has just begun (after finishing the 3G auction), and bids on the two, 20 MHz slots available in the country are now facing competition from TD-LTE backer Qualcomm.

Germany’s spectrum auction in the 2.6 GHz band will open up some 190 MHz for “4G” broadband wireless. Germany’s auction included two 20 MHz slots totaling some 40 GHz, and some 140 GHz devoted to paired LTE for cellular carriers.

This 2.6 GHz spectrum road map is now expected to be followed by most of the countries of the world for their “4G” auctions.

But if the 50 MHz chunk of 2.6 GHz spectrum goes to TD-LTE, then it could be curtains for WiMAX technology as a major global force.

Global WiMAX subscriptions are expected to grow from nearly 5 million today to 92.3 million in 2015, according to 4G Trends. LTE subscribers are expected to hit 200 million by 2015, according to Maravedis.

Today there are 5 billion mobile subscribers across the globe. The top 25 mobile operators accounted for almost 22 percent of those subscribers, or 1 billion people. Cellular operators are overwhelmingly committed to LTE.

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