Recent consolidation among commercial wireless operators in the U.S. will set the stage for 3G networks to proliferate in the U.S., said Nobuharu Ono, president and CEO of NTT DoCoMo USA, speaking at the Radio Club of America’s annual awards banquet. Ono credited U.S. vendors with wireless innovations such as Wi-Fi and WiMAX, but said “their impact is up for debate.” He also noted that the U.S. trails far behind Japan in the development of 3G networks and services.
ArrayComm today announced its Network MIMO software that implements all antenna processing aspects of the WiMAX profiles approved by the WiMAX Forum Mobile Task Group (MTG) for IEEE 802.16e. The solution includes unique support of MIMO, AAS, and combined MIMO/AAS modes on both client devices and base stations, providing operators with the best possible user data rates, cell range, and network capacity for mobile WiMAX. At the MTG meeting in Beijing last week, the WiMAX operator and manufacturer community finalized recommendations for the profiles for interoperable implementations of IEEE 802.16e. The profiles now proceed toward ratification by the WiMAX Forum Technical Working Group and Board.
DoCoMo competitor BB Mobile, a SOFTBANK Group company, LG Electronics (LGE) and Nortel have demonstrated wireless "triple play" – the ability to deliver simultaneous broadband voice, video and data services – across multiple wireless broadband access technologies. The BB Mobile, LGE and Nortel tests were conducted across BB Mobile’s live trial HSDPA 3G cellular network and LGE and Nortel’s pre-WiMAX (802.16e) and WLAN networks in Japan’s Saitama prefecture, located northwest of Tokyo. The demonstration also included Nortel’s Multimedia Communication Server 5100, which delivers SIP-based multimedia and collaborative applications to end users.
Yozan Inc. has announced that it will terminate most of its PHS (personal handy-phone system) services in Japan at the end of November and make the shift to its new wireless broadband services starting in December. Yozan aquired the PHS sysytem from Tokyo Electric in August 2002 and has since watched customers migrate to new, faster 3G services. See the company’s Japanese press release, in .PDF format, here.
ARNnet; A new Japanese telecommunications carrier plans to launch a national wireless network by the end of 2006 that will offer voice and data services using the emerging WiMax network technology combined with city-based WLANs (wireless LANs), a company backing the carrier said on Wednesday. The WiMax network will consist of about 200,000 access points (Must be a typo! – Ed.) each with a range of up to 3 kilometers. They will offer connection speeds of around 75 Mbps (bits per second) and cover 80 percent of Japan’s population by the end of 2007, according to Kaori Ogawa, a spokeswoman for Heisei Denden, a Tokyo-based communications carrier.
Airspan Networks said Monday that it would allow Fujitsu Telecommunications Europe to resell its WiMAX base-station products. Specifically, Fujitsu will resell the HiperMAX, MacroMAX and MicroMAX base stations, as well as the EasyST and ProST customer premises equipment, which use the Intel “Rosedale” WiMAX chipset. Airspan also clarified the timing of the EasyST’s deployment, which will occur during the third quarter.
