Mobile WiMax

Alvarion: Wave 2

Posted by samc on December 26th, 2007

Alvarion earlier this week said it had landed its first Tier I carrier deal for Mobile WiMAX equipment, but did not name the provider. Telephony believes the customer may be France Telecom. Alvarion, a relatively small Israeli broadband wireless company, could be propelled to the top ranks of the highly competitive WiMAX market, says the magazine

Israeli business publication Globes reported that the Alvarion and FT were in talks for a WiMAX deployment. Alvarion vice president for strategy and marketing Rudy Leser said he could not comment on whether France Telecom was the customer, saying only that the carrier was a Tier 1 wireline and wireless operator with operations in multiple countries around the world.

Leser said the deployment would take the form of commercial launch—not a trial—in multiple countries, using multiple spectrum bands ranging from 2.5 GHz to 3.5 GHz.

That profile could easily fit France Telecom, but it could also apply to several other European and Asian operators and loosely even U.S. provider Clearwire (though a Clearwire tie-up is highly unlikely due to its close relationship with Motorola). Whoever the mystery carrier is though, it stands to raise Alvarion’s profile in WiMAX when it is revealed.

Nortel Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia and Motorola are among the largest Mobile WiMAX vendors. The doors for Wave 2 certification have now opened, testing interoperability for the full compliment of Mobile WiMAX features; including MIMO, smart beamforming, multiple frequencies and bandwidths. Wave 1 certified gear, currently the only stuff tested for interoperability, is only usuable in South Korea.

The WiMAX Forum says its lead certification lab in Malaga, Spain, is now accepting Mobile WiMAX equipment for interoperability testing and certification. Both Wave 1 and Wave 2 base station and customer premise gear will start before the end of the year, barely beating the Forum’s rescheduled deadline to begin testing by the end of 2008, notes Telephony.

Its four other labs including one in Virginia, Taiwan, China, and South Korea will open shortly, giving vendors five locations to test their equipment against the IEEE 802.16e specification and the forum’s two stated profiles. The Wave 1 profile (pdf), targeted at Korea, tests equipment in the 2.3 GHz band using single-input/single output (SISO) configurations.

Wave 2 testing incorporates additional modes of operation (for example: idle, pager, and sleep modes) and requires mobile subscriber units to incorporate smart antenna technologies, such as beamforming and MIMO, for improved network performance. Wave 2 works in the 2.5 GHz bands used by Sprint and Clearwire and incorporates multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) smart antenna technology. Sprint has made MIMO a prerequisite for its WiMAX launch next year.

The Korean WiBro deployment, using Wave 1 certified gear, is being implimented by Korea Telecom (KT) and SK Telecom. Their WiBro service began in June of 2006. While SK Telecom’s rollout has been very slow, KT has moved ahead, to about 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year. SK Telecom has selected Samsung as its equipment provider for Wave 2 deployments, and plans to use Wave 2 gear in its major thrust. Samsung will use Beceem WiMAX chips in multiple generations of user terminal products.

Availability of Wave 2 compliant devices is expected to jump start Mobile WiMAX since it utilizes beamforming, MIMO and QOS as a baseline requirement. Wirelessnet Design Line has a roundup of Wave 2 chips. Maravedis claims there are nearly 1 million WiMax users around the world. Most of them, however, are still using pre-WiMax or fixed WiMAX networks, with Alvarion the dominant supplier.

source : dailywireless.org