Today Motorola announced several new media solutions for consumers. Six new products - ranging from a CDMA-based femtocell to a plug-and-play desktop for indoor fixed WiMAX deployments - will debut at next week’s CTIA, April 1-3, 2008 in Las Vegas.

• Motorola’s Mobile TV DH02. A touch screen device for multimedia entertainment, TV and navigation on the go. It is said to feature Live DVB-H TV with PVR capabilities – timeshift, live pause, frame grabbing. Of course finding a live DVB-H transmitter in the USofA might be tricky.
• Motorola Long Term Evolution (LTE) Demos. Motorola will demonstrate its Long Term Evolution (LTE) solutions at CTIA Wireless 2008.
• CDMA Femtocell. Motorola will demonstrate its expanded femtocell portfolio, including its CDMA solution. It’s an expansion of its current line of 3G UMTS femtocell CPE announced at Mobile World Congress last month.
• A Common Wireless Broadband Platform to Support Both WiMAX and LTE. The new common wireless broadband platform will be used to support both WiMAX 802.16e access points and the Long Term Evolution (LTE) evolved Node-B (eNodeB). The new common platform is physically smaller than the first generation WiMAX product and can be software configurable to support either WiMAX or LTE.
• The WiMAX Wave-2 Ready CPEi 150. The plug-and-play desktop CPEi 150 for indoor fixed WiMAX deployments, is 802.16e-compliant Wave-2 ready.
• CDMA/EV-DO Rev-A to LTE Network Handoffs. Motorola today announced the first successful packet-switched network handoff between CDMA EV-DO Rev-A and Long Term Evolution (LTE) technologies. Motorola says it illustrates how service providers using CDMA-based networks today can smoothly integrate LTE into their network.

Motorola, with partners Intel, Clearwire and XOHM, will offer mobile WiMAX “test drives” around the Las Vegas Convention Center to demonstrate WiMAX from an end user’s perspective, as they did at CES earlier this year and more recently at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

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Airspan announced today that it has obtained FCC certification (pdf) to market its compact MicroMAX base station in the 3.65 GHz frequency band as well as the full suite of subscriber devices including the indoor EasyST and outdoor ProST, both of which also support optional WiFi and VoIP extensions.

This new certification follows the FCC approval at the end of 2007 of Airspan’s HiperMAX base station in the 3.65GHz band, now making available to US customers a full complement of products.

HiperMAX and MicroMAX base stations have been broadly deployed internationally.

Declan Byrne, Airspan’s Chief Marketing Officer, commented, “We are now among a very select group of equipment providers with FCC certified solutions in 3.65GHz, and we are excited to offer a range of best in breed, competitively-priced, and field-proven base station and CPE products to the US Carrier community. This is a very attractive market space with dozens of new entrants and Airspan is quickly claiming first mover advantage.

New customer wins for their 3.65GHz Product suite include KeyOn Communications (to over 13,000 households in Pahrump, Nevada), and Le-Ru Telecom (in rural Missouri).

The “lightly regulated” 3.65 - 3.7 GHz band, is non-exclusive, but does require base station registration and a filing fee for the spectrum by each provider. This is close to the unlicensed-band approach, aside from the registration and fee.

The block of 50 MHz spectrum boasts a mid-range blend of power allotment (higher than unlicensed spectrum and lower than licensed spectrum) that has a lot of utility, especially for rural providers. A restriction of WiMAX gear to the lower 25 MHz is designed to prevent interference with unrestricted protocols in the upper 25 MHz.

In June 2007, the FCC opened up the 3.65 - 3.7 GHz band (FCC-05-56 pdf and FCC-07-99 pdf), in an attempt to ‘encourage multiple entrants and stimulate the expansion of broadband service to rural and under served areas,’ with applications for nationwide licenses being accepted from November 15, 2007. Since then, manufacturers of existing 3.5GHz WiMAX products have been working to have their products certified by the FCC, with Redline Communications being the first to announce a 3.65 GHz product to be approved for operation in the United States.” PDQLink, a Wireless Internet Service Provider in Illinois is also testing Redline’s 3.65 GHz RedMAX products.

Redline’s WiMAX products also include the RedMAX Indoor Subscriber Unit (SU-I) and Outdoor Subscriber Unit (SU-O) designed for enterprise and residential services, as well as a software management suite.

The FCC’s 3650-3700 MHz band requires fixed and base stations be at least 150 km from 86 grandfathered earth stations without consent, or within 80 km of three federal radar facilities without successful coordination. The rules give the locations of these facilities. The FCC’s public notice is available here (pdf).

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Motorola announced today that it is expanding their wi4 WiMAX access point portfolio with the introduction of the new 802.16e Wave 2-ready WAP 450. The WAP 450 access point uses the recently announced 4G common broadband base control unit.

It has a smaller common equipment cabinet and a more powerful tower-top RF module than the 400 series (right), delivering up to 10 watts of power output per sector at the antenna port. That’s comparable to 20 watts or more power of a traditional ground base station which typically looses half of its power in the RF cables, says Motorola.

The new product will be available in the 2.3 GHz, 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz frequency bands commonly used by WiMAX operators worldwide.

The WAP 450 is WiMAX Wave 2-ready and incorporates diversity antenna techniques which allow the realization of Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) capability offering greater range performance, improved in building penetration along with full mobility support.

With an ultra light infrastructure, highly integrated design, and very low power consumption, is said to speed installation and simplifies infrastructure.

The WAP 450 is scheduled to be available in Q4 2008 in the 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz bands and Q1 2009 in the 3.5 GHz frequency band.

Clearwire is rolling out Mobile WiMAX in the Portland region using Motorola gear. Here’s an installation near the DailyWireless office I shot last week.

For the last four years, Scott Richardson, the chief strategy officer for Clearwire, has heard every year that “this is the year of WiMAX.” Richardson laughs now when asked if 2008 is the “year of WiMAX”, says Wireless Week. But, he says, “I think clearly WiMAX has gone through the hype cycle and now it is a reality.”

Clearwire, founded in 2003 by Craig McCaw, launched its first market, Jacksonville, Fla., in 2004 and now has 50 commercial markets. Four of those are foreign markets, in Europe and Mexico. It has more than 400,000 subscribers, growing subscribers in 2007 at a 91% clip through 14 new market launches and increases in existing markets.

Clearwire has been using pre-WiMAX equipment for its first markets but started trials with mobile WiMAX infrastructure in 2007, including Portland, Ore. It plans to start installing WiMAX equipment in the second half of 2008, although the operator hasn’t detailed how it will do that. Richardson says Clearwire may use dual-mode devices to support both technologies and may overlay WiMAX equipment on its existing markets.

Motorola demonstrated live handoffs using mobile WiMAX on different basestations today in Singapore. Participants in a bus tour are able to experience various mobile applications including video conferencing, web browsing and mobile streaming while moving past access point sites along the bus route. The WiMAX Forum Congress Asia 2008 is being held in Singapore this week.

In related news, Siemens introduced their SE68 WiMAX Express Card which combines two integrated antennas which support MIMO (Matrix A and B) and adaptive beamforming to boost signal strength between the base station and WiMAX devices. It also employs Space-Time-Coding (STC) and Spatial Multiplexing (SM) to improve coverage and effectively double the data throughput. Siemens WiMAX portfolio also includes WIMAX devices as well as home media products such as set-top boxes.

The WiMAX World EMEA Exhibition will be held May 19-21, in Munich. It’s co-located with the Mobile Internet World Europe Summit.

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At the WiMAX Forum Congress Asia conference in Singapore this week, the WiMAX Forum announced the first products to receive official Mobile WiMAX certification. Certificiation will ensure interoperability between different mobile broadband gear and different basestations - much like Wi-Fi.

The Forum revealed the first eight products to get their “certified seal of approval.” Four base stations and four subscriber units for 2.3 GHz were approved:

• Posdata: FLYVO USB modem (pdf) and base station.
• Runcom: stand-alone base station unit and user terminal
• Samsung Electronics: with the SPI-2110 base station and PCMCIA card
• Sequans: with chipsets for subscriber station and base station reference designs

“With the first group of Mobile WiMAX certified products now available, we have delivered on our promise to ensure that WiMAX products are interoperable,” said WiMax Forum president Ron Resnick in a statement.

The Forum said it expected to announce certified mobile WiMax products in the 2.5 GHz frequency band “in the coming months.” Overall, the Forum said it would certify more than 100 products by the end of this year. The WiMAX Forum expects more than 133 million WiMAX users globally by 2012.

KT deployed the first portion of its Mobile WiMAX network in 2006 and began full commercial services in the Seoul metropolitan area in April 2007. The operator has just over 140,000 customers on its WiMAX network and expects at least 410,000 subscribers by the end of 2008, covering more than 40 percent of the population.

Certification of 2.5 GHz equipment will be especially important to Sprint and Clearwire, since they are using 2.5 GHz and need interoperability for nationwide roaming.

The tests took place at AT4 Wireless labs in Malaga, Spain, with input from members of the Telecommunications Technology Association’s IT testing and certification lab from Seoul, Korea.

Mobile WiMAX and LTE have now begun a holy war over broadband wireless standards. But the outcome may have already been determined. Some 80% of the world’s 3.3 billion cellular subscribers already use the GSM cellular standard, and the vast majority are expected to upgrade using cellular-backed LTE.

But proponents of Mobile WiMAX say their data-centric technology is available now, with a 2-3 year lead over LTE (which isn’t even an approved standard yet). And they have an upgrade path that’s also backwards compatible with today’s Mobile WiMAX gear — which delivers some 30-40 Mbps.

The IEEE 802.16 Task Group m (TGm) is their secret sauce — the path to 100Mbps (mobile) and 1 Gbps (fixed) — while providing support for today’s legacy Mobile WiMAX equipment, and meeting the emerging requirements of IMT-Advanced next generation mobile networks.

“We believe that 5 billion people will be connected by 2015, four billion of them over broadband,” says Michael Murphy, Head of Technology for Nokia Siemens Networks, a company that has placed bets on both.

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Nokia announced the WiMAX-enabled version of the N810 tablet at CTIA Wireless 2008 last week. It can be used on the Sprint/Clearwire XOHM network later this year.

Now Monsoon Multimedia has announced support its HAVA player on the tablet, allowing customers to view and control their home TV from anywhere in the world over WiMAX or Wi-Fi. It will be available by June for the Nokia Webtablet as a free direct download.

The TV source is connected to the HAVA device installed in your home (which costs $99-$250).
Users can view their home TV on multiple PCs within the home network or simultaneously on a Nokia Internet Tablet at home or anywhere in the world over the internet. The company says it has “all the functionality of a Slingbox, but with many more features.” The SlingPlayer Mobile also runs on Symbian phones.

HAVA provides controls for Pause, Play, Rewind, Skip, Record, Guide, Menu, Navigation using touch-screen (stylus) inputs or key press inputs on the tablet. The Tablet can also function as a “PVR-on-the-go”, allowing users to record their favorite TV shows and later watch them on their tablets from local memory.

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