Telephony Magazine is running a 6 part series on WiMAX, following the WiMAX Forum compatibility tests, that were scheduled to wrap up last week.
Part one of the series featured Motorola WiMAX gear:
If any vendor can claim to have momentum on Mobile WiMAX, it’s Motorola.
Not only did it come away with a major piece of Sprint’s multibillion-dollar deployment, it’s guaranteed itself a sizable slot of the wireless ISP business with its investment in Clearwire.
For good measure it’s even landed a few smaller WiMAX contracts worldwide, including one for a national broadband network in Pakistan.
Motorola not only stands to make a lot of money selling WiMAX phones and multimedia devices, it can use its handset businesses as leverage for new WiMAX contracts, especially if it continues to target wireless carriers such as Sprint.
Part two of the series is entitled; Nortel: The Lab Rat:
Nortel Networks is aching for a rumble. Or, to use Nortel’s new WiMAX general manager Peter MacKinnon’s more domestic imagery, it’s ready to pit its WiMAX gear against any other vendors in a “competitive bake-off” to see whose is superior.
Nortel has seven years of solid research in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) smart antenna technology under its belt and the intellectual property and patents to back it up. But more than just ideas on paper, it has a commercial Mobile WiMAX kit that MacKinnon claims can achieve a cost-per-bit ratio three times better than any other vendor’s commercial WiMAX gear and a 10-times improvement over whatever 3G technologies can provide today.
Looks like a great series — lots of red meat to chew on.
Meanwhile, Airspan today announced it has successfully tested a prototype HiperMAX base station and 16eUSB device at the Mobile WiMAX Plugfest held at the Bechtel labs, in Frederick, Maryland.
The next step for companies participating in the PlugFest is to achieve the WiMAX Forum Certified seal. The WiMAX Forum Certification Test Lab located at CETECOM in Malaga, Spain will soon be joined by TTA Labs of Korea for the initial certification of mobile WiMAX products.
Mobile certification testing is scheduled to begin towards the end of 2006, with market availability of WiMAX Forum Certified mobile WiMAX products beginning in early 2007. Representatives from both labs are heavily involved in the current mobile PlugFest.
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