Alvarion Announces WIMAX Products For North America

Alvarion Ltd. announced at SUPERCOMM 2005 the extension of its BreezeMAX products to include support for licensed spectrum available in the United States.

While most initial WIMAX-ready products have been developed in support of 3.5 GHz, that frequency is not available in the United States for commercial use, explains Carlton O’Neal, vice president of marketing for Alvarion Inc., the North American unit.

To bring WiMAX products to U.S. operators, Alvarion will introduce WiMAX products for the 2.3 GHz band reserved for wireless communications services (WCS), and the 2.5 to 2.7 GHz band for broadband radio services (BRS), formerly called the MMDS band. The WCS and BRS frequencies are relevant in other regions of the world, such as Asia-Pacific, Russia and Africa.

BreezeMAX 2300 systems for WCS will be available in field trials at the end of the year with BreezeMAX 2500 BRS system trials to follow. The BreezeMAX 2300 and 2500 products use custom ASICs in the base station. The CPE will use Intel’s WIMAX chipset.

Like the BreezeMAX 3500 for 3.5 GHz, BreezeMAX 2300 and 2500 will feature advanced OFDM technology, toll-quality VoIP, and will be WiMAX-ready, so it will be available for WiMAX Forum Certification. O’Neal says the 3500 will the first to be tested, but Alvarion has not registered to certify its equipment when the WIMAX Forum opens its labs in July. “We will do it as it is demanded by the customers,” he says. “No one has asked for it.”

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines

Read Comments [0]