BARCELONA--Alvarion thumbed its nose ever so slightly at 3GSM World Congress today, announcing in the middle of GSM’s biggest global event that it had secured a contract for a fixed WiMAX deployment in the Congress’ host city of Barcelona.

The contract was small, but the symbolism was big. Alvarion won a contract extension with local service provider Iberbanda to launch its BreezeMAX gear in suburban Barcelona and Girona and surrounding rural areas where wireline broadband is not readily available. Previously Alvarion supplied the same gear to Iberbanda for deployments in Catalonian cities Lleida and Tarragona.

The announcement came during a four-day event devoted to promoting UMTS and its high-speed packet access technologies as the future of wireless broadband. While fixed WiMAX is not a direct competitor of 3G as it has no mobile capabilities, its sister standard Mobile WiMAX is harrying some of the traditional wireless providers. Promising broadband speeds but at greater spectral efficiency than 3G, Mobile WiMAX has already turned heads when Sprint selected the technology for its new 4G network. Many of the major GSM vendors have already embraced WiMAX as an alternate or supplementary technology to cellular broadband, but there have been some holdouts, most notably the largest global wireless vendor Ericsson.