Some of WiMax’s leading operators want their chosen technology to have a bit more zing. This week at the WiMax Forum Global Congress in Amsterdam they presented their proposal for WiMax-Enhanced, an upgrade to current WiMax infrastructure that will greatly improve mobile broadband capacities and allow operators to make better use of their spectrum.
Operators Clearwire and UQ Communications teamed up with vendors Alvarion, Beceem Communications, Fujitsu, GCT Semiconductor, Hitachi, Huawei, Intel, Motorola NEC, Samsung, Sequans Communications and ZTE to hash out an interim upgrade for WiMax that operators can deploy before the next generation of the network technology emerges with WiMax 2. Similar to the high-speed packet access plus (HSPA+) upgrade for 3G networks, WiMax-Enhanced will primarily require a software upgrade to the base station, with an optional antenna upgrade adding additional capacity to the network. The upgrade, however, isn’t requiring the WiMax sector to go back to the drawing board. The technical enhancements the working group is promoting are already laid out in the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers' 802.16e standards — they just haven’t been implemented into the WiMax Forum’s certification profiles. The Forum has agreed to develop a certification program for the new enhancements by the end of the year, which could lead to the first WiMax-Enhanced products by the beginning of 2011 — just in time for UQ and Clearwire to use their performance benefits to compete against new long-term evolution (LTE) operators in Japan and the U.S.
