WASHINGTON, D.C--Alvarion announced at the WCA conference a self-installable version of its BreezeMAX customer premises equipment based on the 802.16-2004 standard. Alvarion is one of several vendors at WCA this week that highlighted the importance of CPE improvements to the success of WiMAX, and the company said self-installation merely will be one of the table stakes.

"The holy grail is to get a box where you can just ship it to the customer when they want it, like DSL and cable," said Carlton O'Neal, vice president of marketing at Alvarion. "Self-installation is one of the common benefits of OFDM and OFDMA that everyone will take advantage of, and it's kind of the final step for CPE [based on the 802.16d-2004 standard] to be simple to buy and use."

The new BreezeMAX Si CPE--the announcement of which followed Alvarion's recent launch of its BreezeMAX platform for deployment at 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz--is being demonstrated this week at WCA.

O'Neal said CPE is continuing to evolve at a rapid pace to add new capabilities. With much of the talk at WCA this week focusing on VoIP deployment and business models for broadband wireless service providers, one can envision an eventual evolution to a combined WiMAX router/VoIP box for the home. "Convergence to that kind of home switch could be the ultimate step," he said.