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March 10, 2005

Airspan Intros Self-Installable CPE

By Nancy Gohring

Airspan Networks is launching a line of products aiming to be WiMax compliant, including a self-installable customer unit: The company is claiming that this is the first self-installable WiMax product. Because the CPE is based on Intel’s “Rosedale” chip, it will interoperate with any WiMax-certified base station. That’s an important capability because even though interoperability is one of the main reasons to create a standard, many vendors have said that their first generation of WiMax CPEs will only operate with their base stations.

The self-installable component is also quite important because the expense of truck rolls required to install customer equipment has historically been blamed for failures in developing broadband wireless markets.

Airspan also says that these base stations will be upgradeable to the future mobile WiMax standard. I’ve been hearing that from some other vendors but I’m a bit dubious. The 802.16e standard is so far from completion that I would find it difficult to be able to ensure forward compatibility. But I may have to eat my words in a couple of years.

Posted by nancyg at March 10, 2005 6:17 PM

Categories: Vendor News

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