Companies attending the WiMAX Forum quarterly member meeting and the Global WiMAX Summit in Beijing, China, this week reported that about 13 vendors participated in the forum's second interoperability plugfest, and the first such interoperability demonstration to take place in Asia.

The plugfest took place at the CATR laboratory in Beijing during the seven days leading up to the Global WiMAX Summit, which started today. Participants included Airspan Networks, Alvarion, Aperto Networks, Axxcelera Broadband Wireless, Huawei Technologies, PicoChip, Proxim Wireless, Redline Communications, SEQUANS Communications, Wavesat Wireless, WiNetworks and ZTE Corp., along with test equipment vendors Invenova Corp. and Sanjole.

"In general, the plugest went quite well," said Manish Gupta, vice president of marketing and alliances at Aperto. "China hasn't allocated spectrum yet, so this is something that raises the profile of WiMAX for this audience. It lends a lot of credibility." Aperto and others also were doing their own more application-oriented WiMAX demonstrations at the summit, which many people on site reported would draw more than 2000 people.