The WiMAX Forum says 14 ecosystem leaders are participating in the first-ever commercial WiMAX interoperability and global roaming trials.
The initiative was announced at the second-annual WiMAX Forum Global Congress in Amsterdam. Participating operators, device manufacturers, equipment vendors and clearing houses are: Aicent, Alvarion, Bridgewater Systems, Cisco, Clearwire, Comfone, DigitalBridge Communications, Intel, iPass, Juniper Networks, MACH, Motorola, Syniverse and Transaction Network Services.
“This trial represents an end-to-end test of roaming over live WiMAX networks and will provide a baseline for establishing roaming services and agreements for WiMAX worldwide.” said Ron Resnick, president and chairman of the WiMAX Forum. “Roaming with interoperability is important in order to expand the availability of WiMAX services by enabling users to automatically access networks when traveling outside the geographical coverage area of their home network.”
The commercial trial gives WiMAX Forum members the chance to initiate commercial roaming services that will lead to roaming worldwide. In addition, the WiMAX Forum is providing operators and vendors with the information needed to understand WiMAX roaming and to launch roaming services at www.wimaxroaming.org. The data technical specifications for implementing roaming, and a business agreement template to use with other operators.
“The testing of networks and equipment on leading operator networks will demonstrate to all WiMAX operators that they can easily provide roaming services to their customers,” Resnick said.
