WiMAX Industry Outlines Future Growth Opportunities and Direction

Participants believe the future of WiMAX is tied to its increasing capacity to offer across-the-board interoperability that helps lower costs, broaden bandwidth and enable highly flexible deployment. WiMAX' s ability to deliver high quality data speeds, fast transmission and abundant services is largely enabled by the adoption of advanced, future-oriented technologies, such as 4T4R (4 transmitters and 4 receivers), MIMO (multi-input multi-output), and Beamforming, which are now commercially available by Huawei.

To reach the next level for the WiMAX industry, Mr. Tang Xinhong, president of WiMAX, Huawei, called for increased collaboration across the industry. He stated: If the challenges of WiMAX development, such as standardization, technology, industry maturity, commercialization, and spectrum, can be addressed one by one, undoubtedly the development of WiMAX will be accelerated. Only in collaboration with our partners, can we prompt the evolution of WiMAX.

At the Forum, Clearwire outlined the strength of its current WiMAX capabilities. Clearwire is the world' s largest WiMAX operator, with its commercial network covering approximately 41 million people today in the United States. Clearwire' s 4G networks in Hawaii and Seattle - which Huawei provided, deployed and services - are the world' s first to adopt 4T4R MIMO technology, and can be upgraded to Beamforming through software upgrades. Huawei's multi-carrier technology and fourth-generation base station platform enable Clearwire to significantly reduce expansion costs in the future.

Huawei is a global leader in wireless technology, so having it as one of the primary members of the WiMAX 2 Collaborative Initiative is a clear signal that the continued evolution of 4G broadband wireless technology is on track, said Pouya Taaghol, CTO, Mobile Wireless Group, Intel. Intel commends Huawei' s leadership towards building an open and harmonious industry environment for the deployment of WiMAX networks with an innovative product roadmap to protect operators' investments as they take advantage of the immediate need for broadband Internet services in many parts of the world.

As of March 2010, Huawei has won 65 contracts to deploy commercial WiMAX networks worldwide, including in North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Middle East and Africa, and ranks first in terms of newly added WiMAX commercial contracts. Huawei has delivered global WiMAX projects with operators including Clearwire in the United States, BSNL in India, Globe in the Philippines, and Telefonica in Morocco.