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Nortel Reaffirms WiMAX Commitment, Aligning with Airspan, Intel
By ROBERT LIU
TMCnet Wireless and Technology Columnist
Nortel on Thursday reinforced its commitment to the WiMAX movement, signing a reseller agreement with Airspan Networks and signaling its recently formed LG-Nortel joint venture will support the wireless broadband efforts spearheaded by Intel.
Nortel, a major provider of 3G cellular equipment, has made it perfectly clear in the past few months that it will offer fixed and mobile WiMAX products as part of a fixed-mobile convergence strategy. Today, it signed a master reseller agreement granting the company worldwide rights to resell Airspan’s HiperMAX, MacroMAX and MicroMAX base-station products, as well as EasyST and ProST customer premise equipment.
"We're taking the best of what we've learned from our successful cellular, Internet, and voice businesses and combining it to create industry-advancing solutions designed to meet the growing demand for wireless broadband," said Mark Whitton, vice president and general manager, WiMAX and Wireless Mesh Networks, Nortel.
The latest announcements come a year after Nortel joined the WiMAX Forum, which has been working to get fixed WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) products onto the market this year but has stumbled in its push for mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e). The goal is to eventually eliminate the need for expensive wired T1/E1 or DSL circuits for wireless backhaul, creating a simpler path to profitability for service providers.
Since joining, Nortel has been instrumental to the emerging mobile standard, contributing its intellectual property to help advance the OFDM modulation schema and MIMO (multiple in, multiple out) antennae technology for spectral efficiency. The company has also aligned with Intel in its efforts to increase WiFi efficient as part of the IEEE 802.11n Working Group.
As part of the master agreement, Nortel's optical backhaul technology, data networking solutions, and wireless services will be integrated with Airspan's WiMAX base transceiver stations and subscriber terminals. Nortel will also work with Airspan to market and evolve WiMAX solutions in the higher frequency bands for implementations that do not require full mobility. Nortel's fixed WiMAX solutions are expected to be commercially available in Q1 2006.
The deal also comes a month after Nortel contributed $145 million as well as various Asian assets to capitalize a joint venture with South Korean consumer electronics giant LG Electronics. Today, Nortel said that one of the principal duties of the LG-Nortel JV is to jointly develop a WiMAX/WiBro solutions based on the 802.16e standard.
The joint venture work is further evidence of Nortel’s commitment to Intel. WiBro is a wireless broadband standard that been embraced in and in November 2004, Intel announced it would work with LG Electronics to ensure WiMAX compatibility with WiBro. Nortel's WiBro solutions are scheduled for commercial availability following the 2005 field trial deployment in Asia with the LG-Nortel joint venture, with additional mobile WiMAX solutions set to be commercially available following the 2006 trials in North America.
"There is no denying the attraction of having automated broadband connectivity whenever and wherever you power up your laptop," said Phil Marshall, vice president, Wireless Mobile Technologies, Yankee Group. "Promising new technologies often fail, however, for lack of a viable business model or a weak value chain. Support of major networking companies like Nortel is a strong and positive sign that WiMAX intends to compete vigorously for its place in the industry."
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Robert Liu is Executive Editor at TMCnet. Previously, he was Executive Editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg. For more articles, please visit Robert Liu's columnist page.
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