WiMAX vendor Alvarion earlier this week said it had landed its first Tier I carrier deal for Mobile WiMAX equipment, refusing to name the provider itself, but Israeli media have pegged the customer as France Telecom. If the tie-up between one of Europe’s largest telcos and Alvarion proves true, the small Israeli broadband wireless company could be propelled to the top ranks of the highly competitive WiMAX market.

Israeli business publication Globes reported that the Alvarion and FT were in talks for a WiMAX deployment and that the Tier I deal Alvarion is referencing is most likely the culmination of those discussions. Alvarion vice president for strategy and marketing Rudy Leser said he could not comment on whether France Telecom was the customer, saying only that the carrier was a Tier 1 wireline and wireless operator with operations in multiple countries around the world. Furthermore, Leser said the deployment would take the form of commercial launch—not a trial—in multiple countries where the operator has affiliates, using multiple spectrum bands ranging from 2.5 GHz to 3.5 GHz.

That profile could easily fit France Telecom, but it could also apply to several other European and Asian operators and loosely even U.S. provider Clearwire (though a Clearwire tie-up is highly unlikely due to its close relationship with Motorola). Whoever the mystery carrier is though, it stands to raise Alvarion’s profile in WiMAX when it is revealed.

“This was a very long process with a highly educated operator on the technical details of 802.16e,” Leser said. “It shows we can compete with vendors much larger than we are.”

Leser said Alvarion went head to head with five large vendors for the contract and was named the sole initial vendor for the deployment. Leser declined to name the competitors, but in Globes’ report Alvarion CEO Tzvika Friedman was quoted as saying Nortel Networks, Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola were among them (For profiles on each of the WiMAX vendors see Telephony’s special online report). Motorola in particular is the industry heavy-hitter landing high-profile contracts such as Sprint’s Xohm launch, both Clearwire’s current proprietary network build and its future WiMAX network, and Wateen Telecom’s launch of nationwide fixed wireless network in Pakistan. But both Nortel and Alcatel have been gaining ground globally making up in volume for what their contracts lack in visibility.

Alvarion was one of the initial leaders in WiMAX when it first emerged as a fixed-wireless broadband access technology. The vendor won scores of contracts worldwide for its BreezeMax base station and subscriber units based on IEEE 802.16d technology, but as Mobile WiMAX—based on the 802.16e standard--gained cache, the large vendors asserted their weight in the burgeoning market. Because of its size Alvarion wasn’t able to compete for the big deals such as Sprint’s contract, and the vendor seemed to be carving itself out a niche dominated by rural and regional operators as well as carriers in developing markets.

But lately Alvarion has caught the eye of larger carriers, landing deals with Telekom South Africa and global giant Cable and Wireless. Alvarion now has 25 deployments of its Mobile WiMAX gear around the world, and in 2007 those contracts started growing from the sub-$10 million size to plus-$20 million, showing that Alvarion is now trusted to handle major launches, Leser said. The Tier I carrier deal is one such deployment, Leser added.

“It’s true, we’re not in the Sprint deal, and it’s a large deal,” Leser said. “But if you look at our progress in other parts of the world, we’ve shown our ability to compete with large vendors in a very competitive market.”