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June 27, 2006

Intel Will Offer One Chipset with All WiMax Flavors

By Glenn Fleishman

Rosedale 2 will support 802.16-2004 and -2005: That means both flavors of fixed WiMax plus the portable and mobile support in the -2005 standard. Rosedale 2 isn’t sized for laptops, but rather for CPEs, modems, and possibly picocell base stations.  By year’s end, Intel will release Ofer-R with Wi-Fi and WiMax in a single package. They want to push WiMax modems below $50.

Posted by Glennf at 1:38 PM | Comments (0)

Adaptix Offers Lightweight 802.16-2005 Base Stations

By Glenn Fleishman

The company has built compact base stations and portable terminals: The focus is on mobile WiMax, part of 802.16-2005, although no specific profiles (spectrum plus encoding) are mentioned here. The company says their products are designed to cover much smaller areas at lower costs as an alternative ot higher-powered but less appropriate base stations.

Posted by Glennf at 1:34 PM | Comments (0)

Navini Pushes 2.3 GHz for 802.16-2005 in the U.S.

By Glenn Fleishman

Navini ships Ripwave for 2.3 GHz: The company says this band will be used for personal communications worldwide. In the US, no one company owns more than 10 MHz of the 30 MHz that’s allotted. This requires some of the smallest profiles for 802.16-2005 (fixed/portable/mobile) WiMax. They’re aiming this at the mobile sgement.

Posted by Glennf at 1:31 PM | Comments (0)

June 18, 2006

IEEE Suspends 802.20 Working Group

By Glenn Fleishman

The dispute has risen to a level the Wall Street Journal notices: The Journal and other sources report that the 802.20 working group, which is devising a plan for mobile broadband wireless, is embroiled in conflict over Qualcomm’s participation through third parties. The chair Jerry Upton, the Journal states, has “disclosed” that he is a paid consultant for Qualcomm. This was unknown prior to recent coverage, and is highly irregular.

Intel and other parties are alleging improper voting activity by a group that is voting in a bloc. The chair of the IEEE made mention of a “lack of transparency” in company affiliation among other issues.

802.20 is considering Flarion’s method of using OFDM, similar to WiMax, for cellular network evolution. Qualcomm purchased Flarion last year. Qualcomm says that it is hedging 802.20 against its own CDMA technology to provide a sort of diversity in case the tide turns against CDMA.

Posted by Glennf at 9:52 PM | Comments (0)

June 14, 2006

Polonix Offers WiMax PCI Card from ENTE

By Glenn Fleishman

The Polish company’s card will be distributed by the Canadian firm: The card uses Wavesat WiMax chipsets to offer a CPE function in a PCI Card. Whether this is a good or bad idea, it’s hard to tell. It will decrease the cost of goods, unless making a PCI Card turns out to be a higher cost item due to lower unit sales. No pictures appear available at Polonix or ENTE’s sites.

Posted by Glennf at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

June 6, 2006

Alvarion Releases a Self-Installable WiMax Customer Unit

By Glenn Fleishman

A customer premises equipment (CPE) device that doesn’t require a truck roll is the holy grail for every new networking technology: When DSL moved from mostly truck roll to mostly UPS delivery, the industry exhaled and started counting their money. (At least until price wars started in some cities.) Self-installation turns all kinds of services from marginal or niche into profitable and widespread.

The BreezeMax Si is designed for indoor deployment, the company says, and works with their existing WiMax gear. The 802.16-2004-based CPE (using chips from Intel) handles both FDD and TDD (frequency time division duplexing), and implicitly can work with the same 2 GHz to 6 GHz range of possible frequencies that their BreezeMax base stations can operate in. FDD requires dedicated frequencies for uplink and downlink, while TDD uses synchronization to allow dynamic asymmetric traffic flows. Both have their supporters.

The supports of FDD and TDD along with a wide frequency range is a critical feature for WiMax CPEs as there are so many potential profiles that combine a channel width, duplexing type, and spectrum band that having inflexible CPE would limit sales even in the U.S., much less internationally.

The unit comes with an integral 9 dBi antenna, and an external, window-mountable 12 dBi antenna.

Posted by Glennf at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

June 2, 2006

Let's Run It Up a McCaw Flagpole and See If Hunts Point Salutes

By Glenn Fleishman

McCaw puts Clearwire in his backyard: Craig McCaw’s neighborhood sucks for broadband; the dirty secret is out. Although when you pay millions for a home, you might not mind $650 per month for a T-1 line, which is almost certainly available there. (The neighborhood is most likely part of the old GTE territory which had very weird landline service problems.)

Hunts Point has a median income of $180,000—average is probably $50m given that Microsoft CEO and billionaire Steve Ballmer lives there—and just 500 residents. McCaw proposed putting up a 41-foot antenna in the form of a flagpole, replacing a slightly shorter flagpole.

Posted by Glennf at 10:55 PM | Comments (0)