Julien Grivolas
First certified WiMAX products announced
At the WCA Symposium, the WiMAX Forum officially announced the first WiMAX products that have achieved certification and passed interoperability testing. Base stations from Aperto Networks and Redline Communications, a CPE reference design from Wavesat and a base station reference design from Sequans Communications have all been approved. Comment: Finally, after several delays, the first products certified by the WiMAX Forum have been unveiled. Initially planned for the beginning of 2005, the certification tests began in July 2005 at Cetecom Labs in Spain. The first certified products were scheduled for November/December, but due to corrections to certain parts of the 802.16-2004 standard, modifications were needed and consequently delayed the certification process by a couple of weeks. The first certified products and reference designs all operate in the 3.5GHz band and comply with the first wave of WiMAX Forum certification process, which focuses on WiMAX basic features. The next waves of certification will gradually add new functionalities such as QoS, indoor capability and support of nomadicity. Today's announcement clearly remains good news for the WiMAX industry because it validates the promise of delivering the real benefits of a standard for WiMAX, namely interoperability and lower equipment costs. Furthermore, the WiMAX Forum announced 26 additional reservations from manufacturers for testing slots for both subscriber and base station equipment certification. The WiMAX Forum will also define additional profiles in the 2.5GHz and 5.8GHz profiles for fixed WiMAX, depending on the demand from operators and vendors. This would give a boost to operators aiming at providing fixed WiMAX services. Regarding the mobile version of WiMAX, the WiMAX Forum plans to certify the first 16e products by the end of 2006. This may be wishful thinking given that 16e certification profiles still need to be defined. However, the industry is going to experience exactly the same phenomenon as for fixed WiMAX, with vendors marketing their portable proprietary technologies as pre-mobile WiMAX solutions.
