WiMAX certification spurs deployment activity here and abroad

Redline Communications Inc. was one of four companies that passed the first wave of WiMAX certification last month, and a company executive tells Report on Wireless that network deployments worldwide are quickly ramping up. Keith Doucet, VP of marketing and product management, says the certification announcement introduced "a second wave of activity in the market" from service providers looking to begin deploying networks. "The carriers are coming out of the woodworks and are really getting on the bandwagon. This whole standard story really brought out the carriers who were are all just waiting on sidelines," he says. One day after receiving notice from the WiMAX Forum that its RedMax base station product had been certified, Redline inked an agreement with HT, a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary, for a network deployment in northern Croatia. Similar deals will be announced in the coming weeks, says Doucet, adding the company already has agreements in place with about 45 international carriers. While much of the activity will be seen overseas, Doucet says not to count out hearing announcements from Canadian service providers. He notes that Redline will be making such an announcement in the very near future, but declined to give an exact date of the announcement and to name the carrier. " going to do what I’m already seeing in international markets: it’s going to create some tension," says Doucet. Because there wasn’t any standardized equipment available prior to the announcement, "operators really felt pretty safe not making at the forefront of their activities. Nobody wanted to be a risk taker and everyone wanted to sit back and wait to see." The WiMAX Forum’s January 19 announcement changed things, though. Certification allows companies that were thinking about trying to get a leg up on competitors by being first movers to act on this. "I think what’s going to happen is you’re going to start to see a lot of activity, real fast, because everybody wants to get a piece of that market before somebody else trumps them," Doucet tells RoW. It is worth noting though that Alberta-based Pathcom Wireless is one of the country’s small operators using Redline gear. Pathcom won a substantial number of 3.5 GHz spectrum licences in Industry Canada’s 2004 spectrum auction of this bandwidth. While Pathcom could possibly be the first Canadian announcement regarding the deployment of WiMAX certified equipment from Redline, other carriers, including the largest wireless operator, have plans in the works. (Recent attempts from Report on Wireless to get the bigger players to talk about their strategies for WiMAX have come up empty handed, however.) Rogers Communications Inc., while mum on its plans, hinted that it was certainly going to be involved in WiMAX last year when during Intel Corp.’s developer forum a link was established between Ted Rogers’ Muskoka ON-area cottage and the conference. It is also worth noting that Redline provided equipment used in this trial connection. Less than two weeks after receiving certification for its base station product, Redline’s subscriber unit also received certification. This gives Redline the honour of being the only equipment vendor to have both base station and customer premise equipment certified by the WiMAX Forum. Montreal-based Wavesat Inc. was also among the group of four companies to first receive WiMAX certification for their equipment. Wavesat develops chips that are integrated into customer premise and base station equipment.

WiMAX certification spurs deployment activity here and abroad

News | 02/08/2006 5:00 am EST

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