WiMax faces fight with rival standard

WiMax will start to "get real" after the recent announcement from the WiMax Forum that some companies' equipment has successfully passed the "first wave" of 802.16-2004 certification.

But analyst firm ABI Research has predicted that the technology still faces a battle with the rival 802.20 standard.

Products now certified as 'wave one' approved include Aperto Networks' PacketMAX 5000 base station, Redline Communications' RedMAX AN-100U base station, Sequans Communications' SQN2010 SoC base station solution, and Wavesat's miniMAX customer premises equipment solution.

"This is a major milestone," said Philip Solis, senior analyst for wireless connectivity at ABI Research.

"There is a long queue of companies waiting to undergo the same certification process. They can then proceed to 'wave two', covering security and quality-of-service. When they too are certified, we can expect to see larger numbers of products actually reaching the market."

At this 'wave two' stage the market will begin to heat up with "real interest " from wireless ISPs in deploying certified fixed WiMax services, rather than the proprietary systems that have been available for some time, according to Solis.

However, the analyst firm warned that the rosy WiMax picture is complicated by a resurgence of the rival 802.20 wireless broadband access technology based on frequency-division duplex technology developed by Flarion.

"With the closing last week of Qualcomm's acquisition of Flarion, 802.20 may get a new lease of life," said Solis.

"Qualcomm will almost certainly attempt to rally support from other industry participants, but many companies abandoned 802.20 to support 802.16e."