The southern coast of Spain was a warm and entrancing, sun-dappled paradise in mid-April — a great choice of location for the WiMAX Forum's quarterly members' meeting. However, the 300-plus attendees of that meeting might not have noticed because they spent most of their time inside windowless rooms on the lower level of the NH Malaga Hotel in Malaga (accent on the first ‘a’), where they debated, hashed out, argued and occasionally laughed over the technical and marketing details of testing and certifying WiMAX products.

The first day of the meeting brought together attendees in a day-long general assembly session in which Ron Resnick, president and chairman of the WiMAX Forum, formally launched the forum's relationship with Cetecom, the Malaga-based independent testing laboratory that will be tending to 802.16-2004 WiMAX product certification testing in July.

“Cetecom is now building the lab that we will be using, and it will be up and running in July,” Resnick said, adding that nine network base stations and nine customer premises equipment systems already have been submitted for certification. Testing of individual equipment and interoperability tests are expected to take one to two months, and the first WiMAX Forum Certified commercial products should start to appear on the market by the end of the year, Resnick said.

After the general assembly, forum members broke into their respective working groups — service provider, marketing, network, technical, certification and regulatory — to “dot the i's and cross the t's of product certification,” as one forum member put it. For instance, in the Marketing Working Group, Mo Shakouri, vice president of marketing for the WiMAX Forum, and Ed Agis, vice-chairman of the Certification Working Group, led a discussion of exactly what the forum's product certification logo should look like — including color, size, language and how individual words used on the logo might serve to include or exclude specific market targets.

With 802.16e Mobile WiMAX certification approaching next year and many forum members saying they would like that certification process to follow quickly on the heels of the current one, some of the working groups continued to debate behind closed doors until well after 8 p.m. during the three days of the members meeting. They were rewarded with a couple of brief field trips — one to the outlying Andalucian hills for a tour of Cetecom's main facility, and the other to a seaside golf course for dinner and an exhibition of Flamenco dancing — or as Shakouri called it, “the dancing of the Flamingos.”