Stuart Corner
Thursday, 20 December 2007 02:32
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
After years of hype and unfilled expectations, 2008 could finally be the year that mobile WiMAX 'arrives'. The vendors are, as usual, bullish, but as 2007 draws to a close there seems to be cause for confidence.
One of the most important prerequisites for wide scale commercial deployment of mobile WiMAX was put in place this week when the WiMAX Forum said that its first interoperability test lab for mobile WiMAX, in Spain, is now open for business testing equipment for the 2.3GHz and 2.5GHz bands. The Forum expects its four other certification labs in the US, Taiwan, China and Korea to open for formal mobile WiMAX certification testing shortly, and it is predicting that "hundreds" of products will be submitted for testing.
The Forum says it will conduct additional product interoperability activities for new Mobile WiMAX profiles and features, such as testing for the planned certification for 3.5GHz and 700MHz profiles and core network certification through Mobile WiMAX PlugFests in 2008.
Naturally the organisation was crowing. "This important milestone in our WiMAX Forum certification program culminates years of development of our certification process and signifies the success of the WiMAX ecosystem's progress and market lead relative to alternative mobile broadband technologies such as LTE which are several years behind WiMAX technology," said its president, Ron Resnick. The WiMAX Forum currently estimates that more than 300 operators in over 65 countries have deployed Mobile WiMAX pilots and trials.
Leading WiMAX vendor Motorola was also bullish. It announced an update on its progress with the technology and rollouts. "We've seen tremendous progress in the deployment of 802.16e WiMAX technology worldwide this year," said Fred Wright, senior vice president, WiMAX and Cellular Networks, Motorola Home & Networks Mobility. "While we spent the majority of 2007 proving the commercial viability of WiMAX technology, we will see the commercial launch of dozens of WiMAX systems in 2008 with a wide variety of customer premises equipment, PC cards, mobile devices, and innovative applications."
