NEW ORLEANS--Motorola today made its official entrée into WiMAX field today, announcing at CTIA Wireless 2005 its WiMAX portfolio for its Canopy product line. The line of base station gear and customer premise equipment is targeted at the 3.5 GHz frequencies for the international market, and Motorola hopes to have it certified and shipping in volume by early next year.

Motorola is launching a WiMAX base station and both indoor and outdoor CPE equipment designed to support VoIP, broadband data and video in a fixed wireless deployment. Motorola was only demoing prototype versions of its CPE on the show floor. Based on the WiMAX 802.16-2004 (formerly 802.16d) standard, Motorola and other vendors are still awaiting inoperability and certification trials, which are expected to be conducted in the WiMAX Forum’s Spain laboratories this summer.

Once the trials are completed and vendors can demonstrate their equipment meets basic performance requirements and can interoperate with multiple vendors’ CPE units, vendors can finally label their products WiMAX. The delay in certification trials, however, has led many vendors to launch their products ahead of certification. While Motorola is planning its commercial launch after the process is complete, companies such as Alvarion, Aperto and Wi-LAN have already begun shipping the base stations that will become their WiMax certified gear, creating confusion over what the term WiMAX really means. One of the big hold-ups has also been the lack of the WiMAX baseband chipsets which CPE vendors need to start manufacturing their end-user equipment in volume.

Last week, however, Airspan announced it would ship in the third quarter a consumer CPE product with Intel “Rosedale” WiMAX system-on-the-chip embedded, and Intel has confirmed that it is ready to support its customers commercial product launches this year.

Motorola at CTIA also launched a new CPE for legacy Canopy system. Called the Advantage Subscriber Module, the unit is designed for consumer self-installed deployed and supports up to 14 Mb/s of throughput with only 5-7 milliseconds of latency. Motorola also said the module is engineered to eventually support WiMAX with just a software upgrade.