The next generation of mobile broadband access is shaping up to be a showdown between WiMax and Long Term Evolution (LTE), with one technology winning and the other potentially going the way of Betamax or HD DVD.

But one executive from Intel said customers would be better off if the 4G services were unified.

"In our view they ought to be harmonized," Sean Maloney, head of sales and marketing at Intel, told reporters on Wednesday at the Computex show in Taiwan. The major concern Maloney cited was confusion among consumers between the two competing technologies.

"We would much prefer to see over a period of time that it looked to a global consumer that simply high-speed bandwidth was available," Maloney said.

Both standards are faster than the existing mobile broadband networks, but LTE is expected to offer higher speeds than WiMax.

Unlike rivals GSM and CDMA, both 4G networks are based on OFDM, so a unified standard is possible. Motorola has said 85% of the technology and work for WiMax equipment will be reused in its designs for LTE equipment.

Intel, which has been a staunch investor in WiMax technologies, is introducing processors later this year for WiMax that could technically be used for LTE, although Maloney said that wasn't in the company's plans.

WiMax networks and products should be rolled out by the end of the year. Chief proponents include Sprint, Google, Intel, and Time Warner.

LTE, on the other hand, isn't expected to be rolled out until 2010 at the earliest. But the majority of wireless carriers are backing it for their 4G networks.