Category: CPEs

June 14, 2006

Polonix Offers WiMax PCI Card from ENTE

By Glenn Fleishman

The Polish company’s card will be distributed by the Canadian firm: The card uses Wavesat WiMax chipsets to offer a CPE function in a PCI Card. Whether this is a good or bad idea, it’s hard to tell. It will decrease the cost of goods, unless making a PCI Card turns out to be a higher cost item due to lower unit sales. No pictures appear available at Polonix or ENTE’s sites.

Posted by Glennf at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

June 06, 2006

Alvarion Releases a Self-Installable WiMax Customer Unit

By Glenn Fleishman

A customer premises equipment (CPE) device that doesn’t require a truck roll is the holy grail for every new networking technology: When DSL moved from mostly truck roll to mostly UPS delivery, the industry exhaled and started counting their money. (At least until price wars started in some cities.) Self-installation turns all kinds of services from marginal or niche into profitable and widespread.

The BreezeMax Si is designed for indoor deployment, the company says, and works with their existing WiMax gear. The 802.16-2004-based CPE (using chips from Intel) handles both FDD and TDD (frequency time division duplexing), and implicitly can work with the same 2 GHz to 6 GHz range of possible frequencies that their BreezeMax base stations can operate in. FDD requires dedicated frequencies for uplink and downlink, while TDD uses synchronization to allow dynamic asymmetric traffic flows. Both have their supporters.

The supports of FDD and TDD along with a wide frequency range is a critical feature for WiMax CPEs as there are so many potential profiles that combine a channel width, duplexing type, and spectrum band that having inflexible CPE would limit sales even in the U.S., much less internationally.

The unit comes with an integral 9 dBi antenna, and an external, window-mountable 12 dBi antenna.

Posted by Glennf at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2005

Shipment Bragging Rights to Alvarion?

By Glenn Fleishman

Alvarion issued a press release about their 10,000 BreezeMax Pro subscriber unit orders: They’ve shipped 5,000 of these already to 30 customers. These early units employ Intel’s 802.16-2004 chipset which can’t yet be called WiMax certified. Numbers from anyone else?

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September 08, 2005

Alvarion Ships Intel-Based WiMax Ready Gear

By Glenn Fleishman

Alvarion ships customer-premises equipment (CPE) devices that use Intel’s WiMax chips: The announcement is a little obscure, and I spoke to Alvarion to work out the details. They’re shipping the BreezeMAX Pro CPE, which is what they call WiMax Ready CPEs. The device uses the Intel PRO/Wireless 5116. These aren’t WiMax-certified devices, and the chips may change between now and when certification for the chips is finalized.

Vice president of marketing at Alvarion, Carlton O’Neal, said in an interview, “This is a precursor to having a certified chip and CPE in the first half of next year.” O’Neal is bearish on certification, noting that the October testing by the WiMax Forum will probably have a reduced featureset that may not provide enough interoperable guarantees for major carriers to deploy equipment based on that iteration of WiMax.

But Alvarion has seen an uptake of its BreezeMax base station, which is being used in unlicensed bands in smaller towns and for niche purposes by companies that include Verizon and BellSouth. O’Neal said that as the base station was upgraded for WiMax certification, it would continue to support earlier generations of CPE designed for it, including the BreezeMax Pro CPE.

The Pro CPE will upgradable, O’Neal said: “The commitment we’ve made is that we would make a software and/or firmware upgrade for those BreezeMax base stations.” However, he noted, there may be “some money changing hands” and early deployers may have no need to swap out CPEs if the certified featureset offers no substantive improvements that can’t be delivered via firmware.

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July 04, 2005

Alvarion Touts Self-Installable CPE

By Nancy Gohring

Alvarion introduced a self-installable CPE: Self installation was really one of the key original goals of WiMax. Some operators that have launched broadband wireless networks historically and failed, have said that the high cost of sending technicians out to install CPEs was one major issue that broke the business case. Self-installable CPEs will allow operators to send the modem to users who can set it up themselves, just like DSL or cable modem services.

Posted by nancyg at 04:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack