WiMAX technologist Wavesat is putting mobility in Fixed WiMAX--or at least portability. At WiMAX World Europe in Vienna this week, the chip vendor offered a sneak peek at a system on a chip WiMAX solution that supports nomadic capabilities, bridging the gap between 802.16d Fixed and 802.16e mobile WiMAX networks.

Also at WiMAX World, Aperto introduced its new CEO, several vendors announced new deployments of Fixed WiMAX infrastructure and Motorola demonstrated interoperability with its developing mobile WiMAX product line.

Code-named "Shark," the Wavesat chipset is built to specifications laid out by the WiMAX Forum's Evolutionary Task Group, which is developing profiles that support the incremental evolution of Fixed WiMAX gear to true Mobile WiMAX, Wavesat officials said. The chipset incorporates the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme used by the 802.16e standard, supports adaptive antenna technology and has sleep mode and other power-saving features, all allowing the silicon to be built directly into laptops and other portable devices, Wavesat said. While mobile WiMAX will eventually support full mobility with soft seamless handoff from base station to base station, Shark will offer hard handoff capabilities, meaning each time a connection is passed to a new base station the baseband will re-establish a connection.

"This is our seventh generation chip and it goes a long way toward providing mature WiMAX solutions that meet market demands and go beyond prototypes and lab demos," Wavesat chief technology officer Jules-Pierre Lamoureux said in a statement.

Wavesat will be sampling the chipset in the third quarter.

Aperto has enticed ADC active infrastructure president Michael Pratt to the broadband wireless vendor's top job. Pratt is replacing founder Reza Ahy as CEO, but Ahy will continue as chairman of the board, leaving the day-to-day operations and vision to the industry veteran. Before working at ADC, Pratt was executive vice president of worldwide access and broadband systems at Marconi and has held management, engineering, marketing and manufacturing roles at companies ranging from Reltec to Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs.

Motorola today for the first time demonstrated third-party interoperability between its MotoWi4 mobile WiMAX base station platform and another vendor's customer premise equipment. At the WiMAX show in Vienna, Motorola sent transmissions over the 3.5 GHz global unlicensed frequencies to a PC card powered by a Beceem 802.16e chip. Motorola is developing the technology in two different flavors: an ultra-light access point platform designed for Fixed deployments and a carrier-class fully mobile solution incorporating advanced multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) technologies. Motorola said the carrier-class solution would be available for customer trials by the end of the year, while the ultra-light access point solution is currently undergoing customer evaluation.

Motorola also revealed one of those initial customers today, announcing that Wateen Telecom in Pakistan has contracted with Motorola for a nationwide broadband access network based on its WiMAX platform and IP multimedia subsystem core. Motorola said it would begin rolling out 802.16e gear in Pakistan during the second half of the year, providing base station and customer premises equipment and core network to power a Fixed-wireless VoIP and broadband service.

Alvarion announced that Chilean provider Entel will upgrade its proprietary Alvarion broadband wireless network to the vendor's Fixed WiMAX infrastructure, offering the broadband access service to small and medium businesses in 14 cities initially. Nortel Networks announced a trial with National Taiwan University in Taipei where Nortel runs a design and research center for WiMAX technology. The university will not only use 802.16e gear to deliver voice over IP, video streaming and video surveillance applications to its business school, Nortel plans a variety of inter-technology interoperability trials, testing WiMAX to Wi-Fi to 3G cellular handoff.