Product announcements streamed out of Boston during WiMAX World 2005, a show where the attendance increased from the hundreds in 2004 to the thousands in 2005.
As the industry moves closer to developing a standard, traditional and upstart wireless equipment providers detailed their plans to capitalize on the emerging technology.
Motorola Inc. demonstrated the capabilities of its Moto Wi4 Canopy solutions. The product is based on Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystem architecture and delivers Voice over IP, end-to-end converged services and applications across broadband networks and emerging WiMAX environments. The service enables IP-based voice, video, conferencing services, unified messaging, ringback tones and other applications working on multiple devices.
Motorola also teamed with Intel Corp. to collaborate on specification efforts within the WiMAX Forum to ensure interoperability issues are properly addressed as the industry moves toward a standard.
- Alvarion Ltd., a wireless broadband solutions provider, announced it shipped 5,000 BreezeMAX PRO subscriber units and said it has orders for another 5,000 units.
The company said the product integrates its enhanced WiMAX technology with Intel Corp.’s PRO/Wireless 5116 broadband interface chip. The company launched BreezeMAX Pro in September 2005.
“It is the advanced state of our current platform, our well-defined roadmap and our strong financial condition that has given dozens of operators the confidence to move forward with commercial deployments over the past several months,” said Tzvika Friedman, chief executive of Alvarion.
- Nortel Networks Ltd. said it plans to offer fixed and mobile WiMAX products based on industry standards, and to ally with Intel and AirSpan Networks to bring those products to market.
- Sequans Communications, a fabless semiconductor company, said its WiMAX products will allow equipment manufacturers to launch mobile WiMAX base stations and mobile devices in the second half of next year. The silicon and software supplier said its WiMAX solutions are WiBRO compliant and can be upgraded as the 802.16e standard evolves.
“With the imminent ratification of the IEEE 802.16e standard, and the capabilities and huge potential of mobile WiMAX, most wireless telecommunications equipment manufacturers and consumer devices manufacturers are eager to develop WiMAX-enabled base stations, phones, PDAs, multimedia players or laptops,” said Bernard Aboussouan, vice president of marketing and business development at Sequans. “With our product rollout, manufacturers will have the necessary components, hardware and software platforms to begin development today and be first to market.”
- Orthogon Systems, a fixed-wireless solutions provider, announced the launch of its WiMAX-compatible OS-Spectra Lite, a secure point-to-point wireless Ethernet bridge. The company said OS-Spectra Lite has been designed to address the high-bandwidth networking requirements of both telecommunications backhaul as well as applications for large enterprises.
- Aperto Networks, a WiMAX systems provider, announced that its WiMAX products would be available in early 2006. The company said its WiMAX equipment features the latest advancements in chip, radio and antenna technologies. The company said its products would be marketed as the PM500 series line within Aperto’s PacketMAX product family.
- Separately, PicoChip and Wintegra announced the joint development of reference designs for WiMAX base stations. The companies said the designs would reduce the time and cost for manufacturers to develop systems.
The solutions combine PicoChip’s family of parallel digital signal processors and software with Wintegra’s WinMax processors and software. The joint reference designs offer flexibility for both radio interface access cards and network interface transport cards.
