First Certified Mobile WiMax Gear ArrivesFirst Certified Mobile WiMax Gear Arrives

The WiMax Forum officially gave its stamp of approval to 10 Mobile WiMax products, marking the first time fully standardized products have been available outside South Korea.

WiMax is a next-generation last-mile wireless broadband technology that can deliver faster downlink speeds than existing networks. The Mobile WiMax profile operates at 2.5 GHz, which is spectrum that Clearwire and Sprint will use to deploy their WiMax network in the United States.

Alvarion and Motorola each received certifications for a base station. Airspan Networks, Beceem Communications, Intel, and ZyXEL received the Forum's seal of approval for use on the customer-premises equipment side. Samsung and Sequans Communications received certification for both.

As WiMax is deployed around the globe, certification will become increasingly important to ensure that devices from multiple manufacturers will function correctly on the network.

The WiMax Forum plans to take in a stream of new submissions and estimates that more than 100 Mobile WiMax products will be certified by the end of this year. By 2011, it expects more than 1,000 products to be fully certified.

"With the successful completion of extensive 2.5 GHz testing, we've laid the groundwork to speed up additional profile certifications and ultimately to continue advancing global WiMax deployments at a record pace," said Ron Resnick, president of the WiMax Forum, in a statement.

The WiMax Forum also said it plans to reveal the first certified products running at 3.5 GHz by the end of the year. It also plans to open certification labs in India, Japan, and Brazil to support anticipated growth in these regions.