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A couple of weeks ago, editors and bloggers alike found our inboxes populated overnight with a dozen or so news releases heralding certain products as gaining Mobile WiMAX certification.
An important step, to be sure. We've been waiting awhile for this.
But it is Wave 1 certification—not the more desirable Wave 2, which among other things includes all-important MIMO—and it is conformance testing. Not interoperability testing or performance testing either.
Beceem, one of WiMAX's leading chip companies, has pointed this out. It is apparently waiting for Wave 2 conformance tests to be ready because Wave 1 is, as the old song goes, "over before it's begun."
On the other hand, PR advantage aside, Wave 1 could be viewed as being on the road to Wave 2. That's apparently how Sequans, another WiMAX chip company, sees it. Sequans is one of the companies with certified products.
"This 2.3 GHz certification milestone marks the beginning of the era of Mobile WiMAX, which is here to stay, and which will meet the growing world demand for internet access the way it was meant to be—fast and mobile," said Sequans CEO Georges Karam. "Wave 2 certification is just around the corner, and we will also be there with certified reference designs."
We've been hearing quite a bit about WiMAX recently. The PR volume has been turned up since January. It may be that at long last we are going to see something more than news releases in the not-too-distant future.
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