The near-term future of WiMAX lies in an unassuming, low-slung, red-and-beige structure, built in a style best described as space-age military. The building, belonging to Cetecom Laboratories, doesn't stand out so much from neighboring structures in its sunny office park, except that it may be even less noticeable — that, and the WiMAX Forum flag that flies out in front of the building.

The facility's lack of character stands in sharp contrast to the surrounding landscape. In the foreground of the dryly pristine Andalusian Mountains, the hills framing the Parc de Tecnologico de Andalucia provide a backdrop that's agriculturally lush, the air spiked with juniper and lilac, the occasional olive tree stretching its knobby, brittle branches toward a bright, but seemingly indifferent, blue sky.

Welcome to Malaga, Spain, the gateway to the country's Costa del Sol region, and the base camp for 802.16-2004 fixed WiMAX product certification testing, which is scheduled to begin in July.

With no WiMAX network equipment currently deployed, no WiMAX-enabled laptops shipped and no broadband customers yet singing the praises of WiMAX as the next best thing in broadband access, there might still be some opportunity for critics to disparage the technology and its future prospects. However, WiMAX continues to take definitive steps toward reality, and no pre-commercial step is more critical than the testing of WiMAX products to ensure radio and protocol conformance to the 802.16-2004 standard, as well as interoperability.

Cetecom, the 17-year-old Malaga-based testing firm, is currently a beehive of activity as the company funnels much of its energy into building a specialized WiMAX testbed to host the gear that will be submitted for the first round of certification testing in July. In mid-April, on a cloudless, warm day punctuated by occasional breezes from the nearby Mediterranean Sea, representatives of WiMAX Forum member companies attending a quarterly members meeting in downtown Malaga had the chance to tour the facility — most of them for the first time.

“Part of the reason for having the meeting here [in Malaga] was to show off Cetecom a little bit,” said Paul Senior, senior vice president of marketing and product management for equipment manufacturer Airspan and also a member of the WiMAX Forum board of directors. “For forum members attending this meeting, it helps you to see it because you will know that the certification process is going to be a sound process and that the dream of WiMAX interoperability is going to come true.”

On the second day of the WiMAX Forum's Malaga meeting, Fernando Hardasmal, the young but raspy-voiced deputy general manager of Cetecom, guided tour participants through a variety of chambers that painted an almost surreal picture of what goes on at Cetecom.

“Be careful as you come into this room,” said Hardasmal, ushering a group of about 10 people into a room in which all four walls consisted entirely of protruding, 2-foot-long, charcoal-colored cones. What looks like a claustrophobic torture chamber is actually a room designed specifically for radio frequency (RF) performance testing; the cones are soft to the touch and help eliminate echo.

Another room in the facility contains a large, fully operational dentist's chair, several electronic arcade games and other gadgets. This room is devoted to testing conformance to electrical standards and will play a role in measuring power usage of WiMAX network equipment.

“Telecom is one of our many markets,” Hardasmal said, catching member of the tour as they looked quizzically at the dentist's chair, “but it is our most important one.”

Next up on the tour is a room containing ovens that are used for environmental testing. WiMAX vendors can expect their outdoor equipment to spend time in here, Hardasmal said. (The ovens inevitably prompted a few jokes about whether or not WiMAX technology was done “cooking” yet.)

From there, the tour group made the short walk to a separate Cetecom building, one painted with a giant mural that obscured the handle to the front door. Once inside, the tour group navigated through a dark, high-ceilinged room that contained spooky dioramas detailing what appeared to be important events in the history of wireless and telecom testing. This building also houses the room where a Cetecom teams tests conformance to the International Roaming Access Protocol (IRAP).

Customer premises equipment (CPE) will be run through access authentication and interoperability tests in a simulated network environment. The room normally is used for IRAP testing of Wi-Fi products, and while a neighboring room under construction was off-limits to the tour group, Hardasmal said the new room will be devoted to WiMAX testing.

To grizzled veterans of telecom industry testing, the Cetecom tour might seem not much different than a walk through any other facility of its kind anywhere else in the world. But to the service providers and vendors working with WiMAX technology, every step of the tour was a step closer to reality, perhaps none more so than the WiMAX technology demonstrations that took place at the beginning of the tour.

Before heading into the “cone room,” tour participants were ushered into a cramped room that contained equipment and technology from Alvarion, Redline Communications, Wavesat and other vendors. A member of the Wavesat team demonstrated how a base station emulator is used to test the physical layer RF capabilities of the vendor's 802.16-2004 chipset. Redline conducted a video demonstration using 2 Mb/s throughout to simultaneously show “Lord of the Rings” and “Shrek 2” over the same in-lab WiMAX link.

“You could conceivably run many services with multiple classes of quality of service,” said Keith Doucet, vice president of marketing and product management for Redline. “A service provider offering video-on-demand could introduce service QOS policies and charge more on a busy night for the different classes of service.”

For the final demonstration that day, Alvarion initiated a live WiMAX link through a base station outside the lab owned by Spanish network operator Iberbanda, which was said by several WiMAX Forum members to be one of the carriers that is most aggressive about deploying the technology. Alvarion carried a live voice and video call over IP to an Iberbanda office in Madrid to demonstrate latency.

Though the lab's demonstration area was dressed with marketing banners and literature — WiMAX Forum officials attending were prodded into a staged photo at one point — the reality of the situation was that the demonstrations showed WiMAX working. It could carry video, and it could carry a live call into the outside world. WiMAX had left the building.

The process by which Cetecom was chosen as the testing house for WiMAX Certification was not taken lightly by the WiMAX Forum. Cetecom was one of 15 different independent labs initially considered for the job more than a year ago by the WiMAX Forum's Certification Working Group (CWG), according to Ed Agis, market development director of the wireless broadband division at Intel, who is also the co-chairman of the CWG.

Of the original group of 15, officials from seven labs were invited to Silicon Valley to make proposals to CWG members. In the third phase of the process, the CWG further whittled its list of potential test labs down to four.

“We went and visited those four sites, and looked at different stuff — the facility itself, the lab's wireless experience, its experience with a group test or plug fest,” Agis said during a presentation at the Malaga meeting.

Ultimately, there were additional attributes that made Cetecom a strong choice, including the firm's ability to automate testing processes and customize its processes. “Cetecom is developing an automated WiMAX tester that will help speed up the process of testing for interoperability, which is something that will help us get to market that much quicker,” Agis said. “Cetecom also is developing a WiMAX testbed that can be replicated, so that certification testing can be set up in different locations for future rounds of testing.”

After announcing Cetecom as its test lab in January, WiMAX Forum members were working on choosing the test cases for first round of certification testing and developing the technical scripts to be run during the various test phases. This part of the process was still going on in Malaga in mid-April, and Cetecom was expecting to receive the scripts and review them by sometime in May.

The WiMAX Forum's initially small, but now increasingly large, base of service provider members have had a great deal of input into the requirements to define in those test scripts, according to Dean Chang, director of product management at Aperto Networks and also chairman of the forum's Service Provider Working Group (SPWG).

“All service providers want certified products that conform to the standard, though the other issue of interoperability is more important to some than it is to others,” Chang said.

“A certain, small number of service providers have been more active than others about helping to define the requirements for certification. In a lot of standards groups, they just go and listen, but the message has been pretty clear here: Tell the forum what you want to see, and then the window closes,” he added, referring to the fact that work on the requirements for 802.16-2004 have been finished, and the SPWG is moving on to work on the requirements for certification of the 802.16e Mobile WiMAX standard, expected to occur more than a year from now.

When the doors to Cetecom's 802.16-2004 fixed WiMAX test lab officially open, the event will probably be an illuminating experience in more ways than one. For now, just about any company in the industry that is planning to sell fixed WiMAX equipment is claiming that it will be submitting products for the first round of certification testing, but it will soon become clear whose products are really ready to be packaged and shipped and whose are not.

Vendors submitting products for testing will have to pay a $15,000 application fee per product for 802.16-2004 conformance tests and an additional $15,000 for interoperability tests. (At least three makes of the same type of equipment must be submitted for interoperability testing to be undertaken.) If the product successfully achieves certification, vendors still must pay a non-refundable fee of $5500 per product for use of the WiMAX Forum's certification logo, which is still under development.

“The testing phase will be a pretty good indicator of who's ready and who's not,” said Jeff Orr, senior product marketing manager at Proxim. “$30,000 isn't something you just want to spend on a whim.”

Ron Resnick, director of industry programs for the broadband wireless division at Intel and also chairman and president of the WiMAX Forum, said that at least nine hardware elements, such as base stations, and nine pieces of CPE from different vendors likely will be submitted for testing during the first round, which will focus strictly on testing of products for the licensed 3.5 GHz frequency band. The conformance tests will begin in July for some products, and maybe not until August for others, and will take up to two months for those tests to be completed.

Interoperability testing will follow, but the timing for that phase could depend on product availability, Resnick said, adding that October or November would be the earliest likely time-frame for the WiMAX Forum to release its initial list of certified products.

“This is really the first time we have had a clear view of the products that will be submitted and when certification will start,” said Mo Shakouri, assistant vice president of business development for Alvarion. “We should have been more aggressive before about lining up the various steps of certification and showing how one will progress to another, but one challenge is that the whole WiMAX ecosystem is being built at the same time. Usually one part of an ecosystem is waiting for another part to develop.”

The fixed WiMAX certification tests this year are not a final destination but rather the first stop on a long trip. If anything, the enthusiasm and expectations for 802.16e Mobile WiMAX are already beginning to eclipse those for fixed WiMAX certification and commercialization. The 802.16e standard will not be approved by the IEEE for at least a couple of months, but according to Aperto's Chang, the SPWG is currently working to define requirements for 802.16e certification testing (see story on page 10).

Right now, it's unclear what role, if any, Cetecom will play in certification testing for Mobile WiMAX. So far, WiMAX Forum member companies — especially those in Western Europe — seem pleased with the choice of Cetecom as a testing lab.

“We're happy to see it in Spain,” said Bruno Potdevin, vice president of business development and marketing for broadband wireless access activities at Alcatel in France.

Redline's Doucet added: “Cetecom has done this before with Wi-Fi, so there is a sense of confidence.”

But Intel's Agis said the forum's relationship with Cetecom doesn't include mutual exclusivity on certification testing, and that ideally, WiMAX certification testing will happen in several locations worldwide in the future. That's where Cetecom's ability to replicate and automate test configurations could prove an advantage. Cetecom's Hardasmal said the firm wants to work with the WiMAX Forum to help establish other third-party testing sites in the future.

“Maybe there can be a testbed for 802.16e in Korea,” said Jung-Shin Park, head of WiMAX development at Samsung, which is based in Korea and is the company behind WiBRO, a proprietary sibling of mobile WiMAX on which Samsung and the WiMAX Forum are working to ensure compatibility. Park noted that Korean carriers likely will be among the first to deploy WiBRO/mobile WiMAX.Though many carriers have their own labs and have an interest in completing certification testing, it's unlikely they will want to host certification events, Alvarion's Shakouri said. “Remember, this is something we're doing for the vendors to get them ready for the market,” he said. “Carriers will do their own testing later of the products they want to deploy.”

In any event, localized third-party certification testing could help make the future certification processes faster and more efficient.

Alcatel's Potdevin said that it won't matter how many certification locations exist or where they are located, just as long as a single goal is kept in mind: “Wherever it is, in India or the U.S. or somewhere else, it must remain an aggressive process.”

WiMAX progression in 2005

january

WiMAX Forum names Cetecom Laboratories as its testing house for 802.16-2004 standard product certification.

april

WiMAX Forum members tour Cetecom. Forum officially launches Cetecom relationship, pledging WiMAX Forum-certified products by the end of the year.

may

Test scripts scheduled to be finished and delivered to Cetecom for review.

july

WiMAX Forum-certified test lab to open at Cetecom. Initial wave of conformance testing begins. WiMAX Forum quarterly members' meeting in Vancouver, Canada.

september

IEEE approval of 802.16e (positioned by WiMAX Forum as mobile WiMAX).

november

Likely the earliest time frame for the first WiMAX Forum-certified products to be commercially released. WiMAX Forum quarterly members' meeting in Beijing, China.

first half 2006

WiMAX Forum working groups aim to finish requirements for 802.1e Mobile WiMAX certification testing.

second half 2006

Mobile WiMAX certification testing begins, location to be determined.

Source: WiMAX Forum