Motorola readies WiMax devices

Motorola used the WiMax World USA event in Boston late last month to unveil one of the first WiMax CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) products and to demonstrate the handoff capability of mobile WiMax using WiMax APs (access points).  

With the support of Sprint and Clearwire, two major wireless carriers that have announced their intent to deploy WiMax coverage nationwide using Motorola equipment, Motorola promised both an outdoor CPEo 200 Series device and an indoor desktop unit CPEi 200 Series.

The CPEs will include integrated VoIP support and will be available in the first half of 2007, as will the mobile Motorola chip sets.

The mobility demonstration used 25400 Motorola APs and laptops with WiMax-enabled PCMCIA cards. The purpose of the demonstration was to show seamless handoff as users roamed between access points and to demonstrate the ability to browse the Internet and use IMS (IP Multi-IP Subsystem) for rich media streaming.

However, a number of challenges lay behind all the hype over WiMax's capabilities, says Juan Santiago, senior director of product management and strategy at Motorola.

Wi-Fi infrastructure for outdoor hot spots is still growing, so business users are not likely to give up their Wi-Fi-enabled notebooks, most of which use the Intel integrated Centrino chip set. Intel is promising a dual-mode chip set that will use both WiMax and Wi-Fi, but there is work that needs to be done to make Wi-Fi and WiMax work on the same device, Santiago admitted.

"It's doable," he said.

The question remains how doable and when? Interoperability with Wi-Fi is hardly the only challenge facing WiMax proponents. As a licensed spectrum owned, mostly, by Sprint and Clearwire, roaming and payment agreements will be needed to leasing spectrum between competitors.