Alvarion today said it has begun volume production of its WiMAX customer premise equipment and is now fulfilling commercial orders for the subscriber gear well ahead of the WiMAX Forum’s certification trials.

Called the BreezeMAX Pro, the 3.5 GHz CPE unit comprises an outdoor unit, containing the radio, modem and high-gain flat antenna, and an indoor network interface unit that can be configured for multiple network configurations from a home LAN to an office router as well as support voice over IP. Alvarion said the IEEE 802.16d-based CPE is the result of two years of collaboration with Intel, and Alvarion claimed it is the first commercially available CPE unit using Intel’s Pro/Wireless 5116 system on a chip, known better as its development name “Rosedale.”

Starting commercial production of the CPE now carries some risks. Alvarion is submitting the CPE along with its BreezeMAX base station to the forum’s certification labs for interoperability and compliance testing in the fourth quarter. Alvarion has previously stated that it doesn’t expect the certification process to result in any significant revisions to its product line, and what revisions may be required can be handled with simple software upgrades.

Ensuring that the first round of CPE units will be certified may not be as a big a concern for Alvarion, though. Interoperability testing, which would pit Alvarion’s CPE against two other vendors’ base stations, is expected to be the most difficult part of the certification process. Although vendors have had ample time to ensure that their gear meets the forum’s basic compliance profiles in their own labs, many of them haven’t engaged in interoperability tests with their competitors. However, the two customers Alvarion announced today are both deploying Alvarion BreezeMAX base stations, so interoperability shouldn’t be a problem.

Iberbanda has been deploying Alvarion BreezeMAX gear across rural areas in Spain and said it is already engaged in trials Alvarion’s WiMAX CPE. Altitude Wireless is also taking shipments of the CPE for use over its four-country Alvarion-built network in France.

Alvarion on Tuesday announced another potentially big win with Deutsche Telekom. Its T-Com subsidiary has launched a small field trial in two German communities to test fixed WiMAX’s viability as a DSL alternative. While the scope is small—limited to 100 users—any larger commitment from one of the world’s largest carriers could give Fixed WiMAX a significant boost as other carriers contemplate waiting for Mobile WiMAX.