Despite all the recent developments in the 4G world - including CTV Infotech's move to using WiMAX over satellite for their wireless triple play product - there are recent reports indicating that overall spending by the carriers has actually dropped over the last quarter.

Netwave is blaming the slowing global economy for the delay in their WiMAX network deployments and they also say that they anticipate the economic downturn will impact sales of their future WiMAX semiconductor products; Airspan also reported a 3% drop in Q2 revenue. For their part, while Alvarion had troubles they remain optimistic about their own future: "Current customers are expanding their networks, bookings are strong, and the pipeline of potential new business is large and growing. This further increases our confidence in our ability to achieve the upper end of our target revenue range of $275 to $300 million for 2008," said CEO and President Tzvika Friedman. It seems like Clearwire is really feeling the crunch though, because of their merger with Sprint: they reported a net loss of $199.1 million for this year, compared with a net loss of $118.1 million this time last year.

What will this mean for the future of WiMAX? Obviously it's going to take a lot of spending to get 4G service available to the public, between research, testing, beta releases, etc. If the economy doesn't pick up and providers are unable to increase their spending, will we see a delay in development?