A battle looms over efforts to win approval for Wimax as one of the ITU’s 3G standards.

The wireless broadband technology was included among the IMT-2000 standards at an ITU session in June, provisionally allocating it to the 2.5-2.69 GHz spectrum range.

It is now undergoing “co-existence studies” to make sure it can sit comfortably in that range with other radio technologies, Lonnie McAlister, Intel’s Wimax Asia-Pacific product manager, told Comms China.

If it passes that it will be ready to qualify as a 4G standard, under what the ITU calls IMT-Advanced, at the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) in Geneva in October.

“It’s a really big step for us on the Wimax side. It’s very positive for the ITU to go ahead on this,” McCalister said.

However, China has set out its stall in opposition. Wan Yi, director of the wireless and mobile department at the China Communications Standards Association (CCSA), the country’s lead telecom standards body, says approval of Wimax as a 3G technology would “unbalance” the mobile industry.

Wan also said he believed the move was being driven by the US government.

“3G technology sits on a triangle of W-CDMA, CDMA and TD-SCMDA, and Wimax would have a big impact on this triangular structure,” he told sina.com. He added that “major W-CDMA and CDMA vendors are all opposed to it.”

However, McCalister said the drive to register Wimax as a 3G standard had the support “of all the major vendors except Ericsson”.

He said the Wimax Forum had been working with the Chinese Academy of Telecommunications Research (CATR) to commercialize the technology, although it still remains at the trial stage. The MII has not allocated spectrum for it.

McCalister said he believed it was being held back to allow China’s TD-SCDMA to become the de facto mobile broadband standard in the country.