WiMax Forum: The number of WiMAX deployments around the world now stands at 305 in 118 countries.
It’s a significant jump from the 260 WiMAX deployments in 110 countries, which was announced by the WiMAX Forum at its Congress Asia event held in Singapore little more than two months ago.
Key to Mobile WiMAX progress is product certification. The first batch of WiMAX Forum Certified Mobile WiMAX products, in the 2.3GHz frequency band and at Wave 1, was announced at Congress Asia.
To scale up capacity for Mobile WiMAX product certification, the WiMAX Forum intends to open two new testing labs this year-one in India and one in Japan-as well as another in Brazil in 2009. This will add to its six testing labs currently active in the US, Spain, China, Korea and two labs in Taiwan.
The WMAX Forum predicts there will be 133 million WiMAX users by 2012. “Analysts are saying that LTE will only have around 20 million subscribers by that time [2012], so we have a clear lead,” says Resnick. “And trade shows like the Global Congress will speed up WiMAX deployment announcements further. It’s going to be a place to bring equipment vendors, operators and application developers together to take care of business.”
Source: WiMax Forum from WiMAX Forum Global Congress.
