As a result of these limitations there is a need for a new standard which will enhance the existing standards for wireless broadband and give a broadband experience as it was meant to be: pervasive, mobile, fast, and cheap. This is where WiMAX comes into the picture. WiMAX tries to take the best part of cellular network access – the part that allows you to easily connect anywhere within your service provider’s wide coverage area – and to take the best part of your Wi-Fi experience - the fast speeds and a familiar broadband internet experience - and combine them into a new wireless standard. This new wireless standard is based on the IEEE 802.16 standard (also called WirelessMAN), and was named by the WiMAX Forum which was formed in June 2001 to promote conformance and interoperability of the new wireless standard. It is common to divide WiMAX into two sub-standards, one for fixed wireless data transmission, known as "fixed WiMAX" (based on 802.16d), and the other, known most commonly today as "mobile WiMAX" (based on 802.16e). Mobile WiMAX includes some improvements over fixed WiMAX by also supporting mobility futures. Throughout this article, the notation WiMAX will be used to designate the more advanced mobile WiMAX.

WiMAX is an enhanced broadband standard with mobile features which enables continuous connectivity and offers wide coverage. With WiMAX support of multiple antennas at a single base station and sometimes at the subscriber unit, the coverage of a single base station can reach tens of kilometers and the data throughput can increase by four times to tens of Mbytes/sec, compared to only a few Mbytes/sec using the most advanced cellular 3.5G technologies. The Third Generation Partnership Project, targeted the UMTS mobile phone standard to cope with future technology evolutions, suggested a competing standard to WiMAX called “Long Term Evolution” (LTE). Both LTE and WiMAX can be seen as pre-4G technologies and the technological differences between them are small as they both work on the same bandwidth and try to provide solutions to the increasing demand for enhanced broadband services with the most advanced wireless technology existing today. As Wi-Fi is already widely deployed and works effectively inside buildings (indoor), WiMAX is expected initially to co-exist with Wi-Fi (connect to and between Wi-Fi hotspots) and to be used in areas where it is more effective than Wi-Fi. WiMAX, as a broadband wireless technology, can also be used as an alternative to cable and DSL as a “last mile” broadband access, mainly in rural areas where there is no wired structure