The economic downturn has pushed the next-generation WiMax wireless system to the sidetrack of the mobile world and set up a battle between network gear makers for a share of future technology upgrades.

Mobile telecom operators are looking at WiMax and Long Term Evolution (LTE) to cope with surging data traffic from smartphones and laptops with mobile data cards. Mobile data traffic grew almost five-fold last year, Nokia Siemens said.

But many are reluctant to spend extra money on the completely new networks needed for WiMax, which faces a dire future.

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