The Wireless Communications Association (WCA) exhibition and conference at the Fairmont hotel in San Jose, this week included several vendor announcements:
Navini Networks demonstrated Smart beamforming using their Ripwave MX mobile WiMAX platform.
Navini says Smart WiMAX is their combination of mobile WiMAX with Smart Beamforming & MIMO.
“Without beamforming, MIMO B performance in many situations is suboptimal at best and non-existent at worst. Smart MIMO takes away that uncertainty allows MIMO B to work in all situations. From Navini’s perspective having both (beamforming and MIMO) is always better.”
Horizon Wi-Com will use Navini’s Ripwave MX8 platform with beamforming on the 2.3 GHz (WCS band), over 10MHz of A-Block radio spectrum that it bought from Verizon. It plans to launch WiMAX services in Northeastern U.S. markets soon.
Fujitsu Microelectronics America and Hopling Technologies announced today that they will ship their jointly-produced Linux-based WiMAX baseband system-on-chip (SoC) reference kits to ODM customers.
Fujitsu is also now shipping its 5.8GHz WiMAX baseband system-on-chip (SoC) to ODM partners and customers worldwide.
The 5.8GHz WiMAX SoC from Fujitsu has been based on the WiMAX Forum(TM) worldwide system profile. The chip has both the performance characteristics and cost-effectiveness to support full base station designs as well as subscriber unit implementations. The Fujitsu SoC, which supports frequencies ranging from 2 to 11GHz in both licensed and unlicensed bands, is now being used in the industry’s first commercially available fixed WiMAX CPE supporting the 5.8GHz band.
Mobile WiMAX is likely to be dominated by licensed carriers. That means Clearwire and Sprint in the United States.
Clearwire is planning Mobile WiMAX services with technical help from Motorola and Intel. Motorola bought Clearwire’s NextNet Wireless unit last year for $300 million while Intel’s Mobile WiMAX chip that integrates both WiFi and WiMAX may appear in laptops and mobile devices next year.
Sprint chose Nokia to be the third infrastructure supplier for its planned national WiMAX build-out (along with Motorola and Samsung). Nokia’s internet tablets and flexible base stations may have played a role.
Caroline Gabriel says , Sprint’s decision will be a bitter blow for the other contenders - Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei and ZTE.
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