Navini rallies support for WiMAX beamforming

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 25 October 2007 11:45

Business IT - Technology

Beceem Communication has been an outspoken smart antenna proponent in the IEEE and WiMAX Forum working groups and was the first to offer a commercial mobile WiMAX terminal chipset that supports the WiMAX Forum Wave 2 smart antenna feature set.

Fujitsu Microelectronics America recently participated in the first multivendor interoperability demonstration of beamformed MIMO over Smart WiMAX , in partnership with Navini. Fujitsu Microelectronics America is a member of the Beamforming task group in the WiMAX Forum's Certification Working group. However Fujitsu, the Japanese parent company is aan Airspan partner and supports MIMO.

Israel-based Runcom Technologies has long been a supporter of beamforming and MIMO and claims to have played a key role in the development of the mobile WiMAX standard.

In the wake of the ITU adopting mobile WiMAX as a standard this week ,  Runcom issued a statement saying: "Runcom pioneered the OFDMA technology since 1997, and was first to introduce the technology as a contribution to the IEEE.802.16 standard in 2001. The IEEE802.16 Standard Working Group voted for Runcom's contribution as the baseline for the OFDMA version of the standard, which finally evolved to the IEEE802.16-2005 standard ratified in 2005, now known worldwide as Mobile WiMAX."