WASHINGTON—Alvarion today unveiled its third-generation broadband wireless base station, based on a developing WiMAX standard. The new BreezeMAX box, designed for international carriers using the 3.5 GHz licensed frequencies, began shipping for trials in February, but Alvarion said today the base station is now ready for commercial sale.

Though built to the latest iteration of the WiMAX’s forum’s evolving 802.16 standard, the new base station is still a proprietary piece of equipment, but Alvarion officials said they expect it will closely match WiMAX’s final specifications. While Alvarion actively participates in the WiMAX forum, the new base station is still a proprietary technology. Alvarion vice president of marketing Carlton O’Neil said that its customers want the functionality of WiMAX immediately before the standard is finalized. When the certification process is set though, the new base stations should require only slight hardware and software upgrades to be fully compliant.

"We built a third-generation product from the ground up based on the WiMAX specs," O’Neil said. "There’s a little a risk, but when you’re out in front there’s always a little risk."

The BreezeMAX base station is built off of Orthogonal Frequency Division Modulation technology for non-line-of-sight network architectures. While Alvarion has only released the product in 3.5 GHz, it is planning on releasing a base station for unlicensed spectrum next year. The base station works with current generations of Alvarion’s CPEs, but is designed to work with WiMAX-certified CPEs when they are released next year and support future enhancements such as smart antennas, OFDMA and even mobile networking.