Alvarion Erases Redline

Broadband wireless access vendor Alvarion Ltd. (Nasdaq: ALVR) is to end an OEM agreement with Redline Communications Inc., claiming that its own product developments have made the partnership redundant.

In December 2002 Alvarion agreed to sell Redline’s Access Node 50 fixed wireless product operating at 5.8 GHz, branded as the Alvarion Link Blaster (see Redline, Alvarion Team Up).

Alvarion has now called time on the OEM agreement in light of its BreezeAccess VL product launch earlier this year, operating in “the 5GHz frequency band.” (See Alvarion Blows a Breeze.)

“We are in the process of wrapping it up,” Alvarion’s VP of marketing, Carlton O’Neal, tells Unstrung. “Our BreezeAccess VL is the internally developed product that we are now selling instead of Redline’s product. In the end, they were a way for us to get to market quickly with a high-speed unlicensed PTP [point-to-point] product while we were finalizing the VL... They helped us build backhaul for our customers' access networks for about a year, but now we are using the VL.”

The loss of Alvarion’s business is a further blow to Redline. The company last month reluctantly agreed to pay royalties on patents owned by rival Wi-LAN Inc. (Toronto: WIN). (See Wi-LAN Settles With Redline.)

“We strongly believe that we do not infringe on their patents,” stated Redline's CEO and president, Majed Sifri, at the time of the settlement.

— Justin Springham, Senior Editor, Europe, Unstrung