Spain labs begin accepting equipment; certified products expected by Sprint launch

The WiMAX Forum today said its lead certification lab in Malaga, Spain, is now ready to begin accepting Mobile WiMAX equipment for interoperability testing and certification. Forum vice president of marketing Mo Shakouri said certification of both Wave 1 and Wave 2 base station and customer premise gear will start before the end of the year, barely beating the Forum’s rescheduled deadline to begin testing by the end of 2008.

The principal lab at AT4 in Malaga was the first to come online, but the forum expects to open its four other labs in the U.S., Taiwan, China and South Korea, shortly, giving vendors five locations to test their equipment against the IEEE 802.16e specification and the forum’s two stated profiles. The Wave 1 profile, targeted at Korea, tests equipment in the 2.3 GHz band using single-input/single output (SISO) configurations. Wave 2, however, is the most significant to the U.S. Wave 2 equipment works in the 2.5 GHz bands used by Sprint and Clearwire and incorporates multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) smart antenna technology, which uses multiple signal paths to increase capacity and coverage in dense urban areas. Sprint has made MIMO a prerequisite for its WiMAX launch next year.

The forum has been slow to bring its labs online, pushing back plans to begin official certification on more than one occasion. Last year the forum settled on the two profiles and planned to begin Wave 1 certification in the spring and Wave 2 certification in the fall, but it later changed its timeline, pledging to begin testing both waves by the end of the year. Opening the doors of the Malaga facility today meets that deadline, but it puts the forum on a tight schedule to get certified gear out the door before some of the major WiMAX launches scheduled next year.

Korea Telecom has had Samsung WiBro networks running for two years and has been seeking an official WiMAX stamp for its equipment since launch. Earlier this week, Wateen Telecom turned on a nationwide network using Motorola Mobile WiMAX gear for fixed broadband access. Sprint soft-launched its WiMAX network last week in Chicago and Baltimore-D.C., but its commercial launch is planned for April. Sprint has always stated it intended to use certified equipment, but in the last year it has taken on much of the mechanics of the certification process itself, such as conducting its own performance and interoperability trails, to ensure a working network by its launch date. But Shakouri said that the Forum intends to meet Sprint’s launch deadline.

“Sprint is not going to launch without WiMAX Forum certification,” Shakouri said. “It is not us versus them. We’re working together on this.”