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April 14, 2005

ETSI, WiMax Forum to Cooperate

By Nancy Gohring

The WiMax Forum said it plans to work with ETSI on regulatory and technical requirements: ETSI is the European non-profit institute that makes telecom standards and works toward global harmonization. The 3GPP was started by ETSI. The 3GPP decides on the technologies that can be used within a certain frequency band and individual regulatory bodies often decide to take the 3GPP recommendations. For example, IPWireless’ technology is part of the 3GPP family of standards so most European countries allow 3G spectrum owners to deploy IPWireless technology. WiMax is not part of the 3GPP family so in most European countries a 3G operator would not be allowed to deploy WiMax.

This cooperation between the WiMax Forum and ETSI could be helpful in the WiMax industry’s efforts to ensure that the 2.5 GHz band can be used for WiMax. The European countries plan to allocate the 2.5 GHz band by 2008 but they haven’t yet decided which technologies they’ll allow there. The 2.5 GHz band was originally promised as a 3G extension band and so the powerful mobile operators are lobbying hard to prevent that band from being used by WiMax operators.

Posted by nancyg at April 14, 2005 4:14 PM

Categories: Standards

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