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WiMAX Forum Newsletter

President's Message

Dear Members:

At our inaugural WiMAX Forum Global Congress in Amsterdam we reached a major milestone with the announcement of the first Mobile WiMAX products receiving the WiMAX Forum Certified™ Seal of Approval for the 2.5 GHz profile. Four base stations and six mobile station modules from eight member companies including Airspan Networks, Alvarion Ltd., Beceem Communications Inc., Intel Corporation, Motorola Inc., Samsung Electronics Company, Ltd., Sequans Communications and ZyXEL. All of the newly certified 2.5 GHz mobile station modules passed the mandatory MIMO testing protocols. Plus a number of additional products are in the queue will be announced shortly.

With the successful completion of extensive 2.5 GHz testing, we've laid the groundwork to speed up additional profile certifications and ultimately to continue advancing global WiMAX deployments at a record pace. We estimate greater than 100 Mobile WiMAX products will be certified by the end of 2008, and by 2011 more than 1,000 products will undergo Mobile WiMAX certification. Infrastructure building is strong as WiMAX continues to gain momentum as evidenced by the substantial increase in WiMAX deployments and industry announcements. World-wide deployments are three hundred and five in one hundred eighteen countries. Read more.

There is strong support for delivering Interoperable products as evidenced by the activity at the recent Plugfest in Malaga, Spain on June 9. The WiMAX Forum's 5th Mobile WiMAX PlugFest brought together twenty eight vendors from around the world to focus on interoperability and performance of Mobile WiMAX(TM) equipment with enhanced testing for Beamforming and MIMO. Read more.

I am very pleased to announce that more than 2,500 visitors from 120 countries converged on the RAI Exhibition and Congress Centre in Amsterdam from June 17-18 for the inaugural WiMAX Forum Global Congress trade show and conference thus establishing it as a premier global WiMAX™ event in 2008. The record attendance by operators at our conference resulted in a high energy and interactive conference agenda addressing key technology and product developments. On the trade show floor, operators and equipment vendors actively engaged and conducted business throughout the entire two days of the event with positive feedback from our vendors due to operators showing up at booths asking for details on their WiMAX products. Our keynote highlight by WorldMAX was impressive with a real-time video demonstration of its recently deployed WiMAX network in Amsterdam delivering crystal clear video conferencing.You can view a video clip of this demonstration by clicking here. (Please note that this clip does not have audio. File size is 29MB.)

Next year’s Global Congress is on track to double in size. Prior to the conclusion of the conference, over 77% of the exhibiting companies rebooked 99% of the 2008 floor space for 2009. We now turn our attention to the third show in the annual series, the WiMAX Forum Congress Latin America. WiMAX Forum Congress Latin America that will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on December 3-4, 2008. More information regarding this event can be found here.

The WiMAX industry is making excellent progress on the IPR front to deliver fair and transparent royalty rates for WiMAX products. Recently, Cisco, Intel, Samsung, Sprint Nextel, Alcatel-Lucent, and Clearwire announced the creation of an organization called the Open Patent Alliance (OPA), which will hold the rights to WiMAX-related patents and license them to makers of computers, networking devices, and other products. It is expected that the OPA will advance a competitive and open intellectual property rights model, thus stimulating a larger WiMAX industry that supports innovation through broader choice and lower costs for WiMAX technology, devices, and applications globally. Read the Open Patent Alliance Press Release.

On the regulatory front, the WiMAX Forum Board of Directors in May 2008 approved the submission of WiMAX Forum inputs (coordinated with IEEE 802.16) to the ITU-R Working Party 5D meeting at the end of this month that will propose the evolution of the IMT-2000OFDMATDD WMAN in line with agreed aspects of the Release 1.5 Mobile System Profile. This submission will include FDD and will be pursued in cooperation with the IEEE. The WiMAX Forum is also contributing to the work of the ITU towards the systems beyond IMT-2000, known as “IMT-Advanced.” For more information regarding this decision review the Development of Mobile WiMAX with IMT FAQ.

Health and safety is taken very seriously by the WiMAX Forum and our members. We are very conscious of our responsibility to the public and other stakeholders. There has been an enormous amount of research carried out regarding wireless systems and health. Many independent expert committees and the World Health Organization have reviewed this research and have found no scientific evidence of adverse health effects at the low levels of public exposure that these radio systems are designed to operate at. For your convenience, we have posted a FAQ on RF Safety and WiMAX.

Please note our new white paper entitled “WiMAX Forum^® WiMAX Technology^™ Forecast (2007-2012)” was released this month summarizing the WiMAX Forum’s User, Subscriber, Operator & Country Fore¬casts from 2007-2012. This forecast is an ongoing project of the WiMAX Forum that will continue to be used to educate the market as the WiMAX ecosystem expands. Future iterations of this report will be more robust, with more details on numbers and methodology. The good news is that WiMAX Forum forecasts 133 million WiMAX users by 2012.

Also this month, the WiMAX Forum published another white paper entitled “A Comparative Analysis of Spectrum Alternatives for WiMAX^™ Networks with Deployment Scenarios Based on the U.S. 700 MHz Band”. There is global interest in allocating portions of the spectrum between 470 MHz and 862 MHz for broadband wireless services. In recognition of the value this spectrum offers for WiMAX deployments, the WiMAX Forum® is developing TDD and FDD system profiles for this general band to address market opportunities globally. This paper provides a comparison of WiMAX™ deployments at 700 MHz and 2500 MHz from a range, coverage, capacity, and performance perspective. It also provides insights to the deployment challenges of having limited spectrum for high population density regions as well as the advantages of having access to the 700 MHz band for range and coverage in the more sparsely populated rural areas. We encourage you to review this very comprehensive analysis.

I look forward to hearing your comments and questions and please feel free to email at r.resnick@wimaxforum.org