Mobile WiMAX is progressing with great urgency as the industry scrabbles to gain a place for the high bandwidth wireless technology among the longer established wireless technologies and their enhancements.

"There's a huge determination in the industry to get this done," Nigel Wright, v-p product marketing at test firm Spirent Communications, told EW from WiMAX World USA 2007.

"The WiMAX forum meetings are different from 3GPP meetings, where everybody is arguing for two or three years about the next version of the standard. This is, 'look guys we've got to get this done let's just agree on this and move on'. So it is moving very fast," said Wright.

Wright believes the speed of development is one of mobile WiMAX's strengths. "It's the upstart technology and that's caused everyone to pull together to try and fast track development and deployment in a way we haven't seen in the wireless industry for a long time."

Handoffs

Motorola demonstrated handoffs between mobile WiMAX access points during the show, enabling uninterrupted connection. The firm said it had achieved successful handoffs moving at over 50mph.

Sprint Nextel is planning a commercial service in 30 US cities using the technology, starting April 2008.

Motorola will also deploy an 802.16e mobile WiMAX network in Uganda and is starting trials in Toronto, Canada.

Wright said the problem for mobile WiMAX at the moment is spectrum allocation. "The huge advantage for the US is there's a decent piece of spectrum available," said Wright. "But there's a patchwork, there isn't yet a global band available."

See also: Electronics Weekly's Focus on WiMAX, a roundup of content related to the next-gen wireless comms technology.