Navini rallies support for WiMAX beamforming

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 25 October 2007 11:45

Business IT - Technology

WiMAX technology company, Navini Networks, has made much of its use of beamforming technology, but has been outside the mainstream of the WiMAX industry in doing so. Now it has gathered some significant supporters who have formalised their backing with the formation of an alliance.

Navini, (which is about to be acquired by Cisco ) along with Beceem, Fujitsu and Runcom have launched the SMART Alliance in what they say is "an effort to drive harmonised system performance and interoperability of smart antenna systems."  The alliance will promote the adoption and implementation of beamforming and BEAMFORMED MIMO (BF + MIMO), both of which are included in the 802.16e-2005 specification published by the IEEE and adopted by the WiMAX Forum for Mobile WiMAX certification under Wave 2.

"The capacity and coverage benefits of combining beamforming with MIMO are very compelling offering up to double the capacity with twice the coverage of non-beamformed systems," said Sai Subramanian, Navini's vice president of product management. "This Alliance ensures broad availability of CPE devices that have full capability of beamforming and beamformed MIMO."

However Eric Stonestrom. the CEO of rival WiMAX vendor, Airspan Networks , commenting on Navini's acquisition by Cisco told iTWire that "beamforming is not at the forefront of the WiMAX forum certification process. MIMO is what everyone is taking about."

The SMART Alliance says it will publish a system performance baseline for the mandatory SMART antenna features adopted by the WiMAX Forum for Mobile WiMAX.