ORLANDO--Motorola continued its momentum in the emerging WiMAX sector, announcing today its ninth Mobile WiMAX contract, this one with Chilean operator VTR. It also released a revamped universal base station that will initially carry its CDMA baseband, but will eventually support Motorola’s other radio technologies.

VTR will deploy the Mobile WiMAX solution throughout metro regions and outlying regions in the country. The network will go live in March 2008 and eventually cover 3.5 million homes outside VTR’s traditional cable footprint. VTR, however, won’t be using Mobile WiMAX for mobility, at least not yet. The technology will be used to connect homes VTR currently doesn’t touch, extending data and voice services to 80% of the country.

The new CDMA base station will become Motorola’s next-generation platform, scaled down to a smaller size and with lower power requirements, said Pepe Lastres, director of solutions marketing for Motorola’s networks business. While still a macro cellular unit, the universal base station is small enough to deployed indoors and outdoors, Lastres said. The first iteration, a CDMA 1X and EV-DO Rev. A base station is available today, Lastres said, but the open IP architecture of the new platform will allow Motorola to add Ultra Mobile Broadband and Long Term Evolution technologies to the box in the future.

“We’re not just replacing the existing macro cell,” Lastres said. “We’re setting up the platform that we’ll be using for the next five or six years.”

In addition to the new macro cell, Motorola unveiled a new pico cell called the M810.