The wide-scale commercial adoption of WiMax has taken another big step forward this week, with the launch of the first commercial WiMax interoperability and roaming trials.

The announcement was made by the WiMax Forum at its second annual Global Congress in Amsterdam, and sees 14 companies from different parts of the industry participating in the project.

These are Aicent, Alvarion, Bridgewater Systems, Cisco, Clearwire, Comfone, DigitalBridge Communications, Intel, iPass, Juniper Networks, Mach, Motorola, Syniverse and Transaction Network Services.

"This trial represents an end-to-end test of roaming over live WiMax networks, and will provide a baseline for establishing roaming services and agreements for WiMax worldwide," said Ron Resnick, president and chairman of the WiMax Forum.

"Roaming with interoperability is important in order to expand the availability of WiMax services by enabling users to automatically access networks when travelling outside the geographical coverage area of their home network."

The WiMax Forum is also providing operators and vendors with technical specifications, inter-operator agreement templates and other information required to launch WiMax roaming services.

"The goal is to demonstrate the WiMax standard end-to-end roaming implementation that will be replicated by WiMax operators and clearing houses worldwide," Resnick explained.

"This includes WiMax networks which support roaming services, and the roaming back-office platforms which track and measure usage for operators to correctly settle accounts with each other."

The WiMax Forum is currently tracking over 475 WiMax network deployments in 140 countries, and has already certified 106 products in the market. The goal is to certify at least 1,000 products by 2011.