Dynamics have really been picking up in the last few weeks for both WiMAX and now also LTE. While the WiMAX supporters have been following a US-style marketing campaign for quite some time now, LTE's proponents have just been watching this all nearly silently, occasionally sending out some strong statements, such as Ericsson's announcement about not doing WiMAX as they don't see any business behind it. While LTE is backed by the powerful GSM Association, WiMAX is supported by Intel and a few vendors who lost out in the 3G deployment race because they were simply too late to the market - a market that then also stalled and developed only very slowly, due to inflated costs on the one hand, and on the other to their plain inability to deliver the big promise of true high-speed data. Today we are still waiting for true - practically usable - high-speed data over 3G networks. Surfing the Web is still not practically possible and just downloading e-mails can be done nearly as well with a GPRS or EDGE connection.

Now for a few weeks the LTE supporters have been sharpening up their efforts. I assume this has two causes: Firstly, that WiMAX got an official endorsement from the ITU, normally a domain that the traditional players assume they own entirely themselves. Not any longer. Suddenly WiMAX can compete for precious frequency spectrum. The second reason is that the market for 3G and newer technologies is slowly becoming mature as well (at least it will in 2-3 years) so now is the time to look at the next technology evolution, which is LTE. This all fits well with the latest announcement of a test group, which now claims to have shown that LTE can deliver true high-speed data. Since there are no standards for LTE yet finalized, this announcement is a pure PR activity in line with the WiMAX folks' practices. I bet we will see many more such activities now, with something of a show down at next year's 3GSM World in Barcelona - which is the industry's largest event, despite CTIA Wireless claiming that they are bigger.
Here's some more on the LTE/SAE testing initiative:

A group of telecom technology manufacturers and network operators comprised of Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, France Telecom/Orange, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel, T-Mobile, and Vodafone have announced a joint initiative aimed at driving forward the realization of the next-generation of high performance mobile broadband networks based on 3GPP Release 8 "Long Term Evolution / System Architecture Evolution" (LTE/SAE) specifications.