Amsterdam Gets Citywide WiMax

LR Mobile News Analysis Michelle Donegan 6/18/2008

Worldmax has launched the first services on its mobile WiMax network in Amsterdam, the host city for this week's WiMAX Forum Global Congress. (See Worldmax Launches WiMax.)

Following last week’s news that Nortel Networks Ltd. was discontinuing its own WiMax access product and partnering with Alvarion Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: ALVR), the Congress delegates surely have a lot to talk about. Nortel is a platinum sponsor of the event. (See Nortel Flunks WiMax and WiMax Folks: Open Your Eyes .)

At the conference, Worldmax announced that it is offering an “early bird” special to the first 500 people who want to sign up to its wireless broadband service, called Aerea, ahead of the full launch in September. For €29.90 (US$46), users will get a ZyXEL Communications Corp. PC card and wireless broadband service for one month. Aerea download speeds are up to 1 Mbit/s, with uplink speeds up to 128 kbit/s.

In September, Worldmax will offer both pay-as-you-go and monthly contract tariffs, as well as USB dongles.

Worldmax, in which Intel Capital is a lead investor, uses mobile WiMax 802.16e equipment from Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU). The service provider has a nationwide 3.5 GHz license in the Netherlands.

In other news from Amsterdam, the WiMAX Forum has certified the first 10 MIMO 2.5 GHz mobile WiMax products and plans to certify the first 3.5 GHz equipment by the end of this year. (See WiMAX Forum Certifies Wave 2.)

The newly certified 2.5 GHz products included four base stations from Alvarion, Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT), Samsung Corp. , and Sequans Communications , and six terminals (or, “mobile station modules”) from Airspan Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: AIRN), Beceem Communications Inc. , Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), Samsung, Sequans, and ZyXel. (See Moto Gets Certified.)

And here’s a wrap of the rest of this week’s WiMax news:

— Michelle Donegan, European Editor, Unstrung