Meet the first four WiMAX-certified products
Fixed WiMAX had its big coming out party on Thursday at the Wireless Communications Association Technical and Business Symposium in San Jose.
I wasn't physically there, but I did the next best thing. I monitored it for you.
On Thursday the WiMAX Forum announced its first four fixed (say that fast five times) wireless broadband network products to be granted official WiMAX Forum certification.
Each of these products were developed according to the WiMAX Forum-defined cert profile for 3.5 GHz systems, which in turn is based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) HiperMAN (not some overcaffeinated skateboarder dude but High Peformance Radio Metropolitan Area Network) standards.
Every certified product was subject to rigorous testing procedures, including protocol conformance, radio conformance and interoperability testing.
Now, let us meet the first four, pioneering, WiMAX-certified products, shall we?
Most of these are base stations, or of similar pedigree.
First we have the Aperto Networks PacketMAX 5000 base station. Aperto doesn't yet provide much specific info on this product, but if it is good enough for the WiMAX FORUM it automtically gets the benefit of the doubt in my book.
Oh, sorry for the fuzzy image, people, but I had to grab this off a PDF screen cap, which as you P-shop users know, is bound to be of low quality.
Next, meet Redline Communications' RedMAX AN-100U base station. Redline says:
The AN-100 uses OFDM optical line-of-sight and non line-of-sight technology to overcome typical urban obstacles such as trees and buildings. The long-range capabilities and high-capacity of the AN-100 allow wireless connectivity to remote locations with a minimum number of repeater stations.
The low latency AN-100 system provides reliable delivery of delay sensitive services including circuit switched voice traffic, voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP), optimized transport for video, and prioritized data traffic - all converged over a single robust wireless link. The time division multiplexed (TDM) option can replace expensive leased full and fractional E1/T1 circuits while supporting legacy TDM traffic and increasing network capacity.
Oh, a pix. Here ya go:
Moving on, we're going to meet SEQUANS Communications' SQN2010 SoC base station solution.
Here's what Sequans thinks is important for you to know:
The SQN2010 delivers unique RF capabilities through a fully digital front end, integrating A/D and D/A converters, operating with any channel width from 1.25 to 28 MHz. It enables superior RF performance through advanced Digital Signal Processing techniques:
Very low implementation margin
Full uplink subchannelization with up to 16 concurrent bursts
Built-in support for smart antennas:
- Transmit Diversity using Space Time Coding (STC)
- Receive Diversity
To give you the complete pix, I combined the product shot and accompanying diagram into this:
Isn't perfect I know, but what can I tell ya. To warp a phrase from author David Sedaris, "me Photoshop pretty one day."
Well, gang, we're down to our last of today's WiMAX Forum-certified products. This one is Wavesat's miniMAX customer premise equipment (CPE) solution. The best info I could find on the Wavesat site about this solution notes the CPE as part of a package that offers a:
Full-range of standard-based integrated circuits, software and reference system designs for the most demanding BWA 802.16 compliant applications requiring flexible product and network configurations. Wavesat products fit design requirements for Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) as well as Base Station infrastructures (Carrier’s facilities), ...
I leave you with a reference design diagram:
Impressed? Hey, Roger Ramjet (a reader and WiMAX fan), what do you think, guy?