Adjustments to standard hold up WiMax certification

IDG News Service - The certification of the first official WiMax products, which had been expected to take place by the end of 2005, has been pushed back by a set of clarifications to the standard for fixed WiMax, the WiMax Forum said yesterday.

The industry group tomorrow will provide an update on product certification at the Wireless Communications Association International Symposium & Business Expo (WCA) in San Jose, said Jeff Orr, the WiMax Forum's director of marketing. Though it's possible some certifications will be announced, the group can't commit to it, he said.

WiMax is intended to be a standards-based form of wireless broadband in which products from different vendors are interoperable, potentially boosting competition and driving down prices through high-volume production. The first generation of WiMax products is based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard, which was ratified by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. in 2004 and defines a system for broadband to a home or office. Products are expected later this year, to be followed by a version of WiMax for mobile use.

The WiMax Forum had said last year that it expected to certify at least three products as interoperable WiMax gear by the end of 2005. By November, working with the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, it had already defined the tests to be run at Cetecom, a networking test facility in Spain. But a routine package of clarifications to the IEEE standard, called a corrigendum, forced the group to create additional tests and make other changes to the process, Orr said. By the time those changes had been made and the group was ready to start actual certification testing of products, the year had run out. The testing began two weeks ago.

Although, a WiMax Forum official said last month that the group hoped to announce the first certifications at this week's WCA conference, even that may have been overly optimistic.

"At this moment in time, certification of specific products has not been completed, but we see that certification as imminent," Orr said in an interview.

He defended the time-consuming changes made after the corrigendum was issued, saying they were unavoidable. "If we had opted not to do it now, we would be doing it in the future," Orr said.

The first wave of certifications will cover only the basic standard, leaving additional features for security and guaranteed quality of service for later tests. Nevertheless, 30 products have been submitted for testing in the first wave, Orr said. When the WiMax Forum announces its first certifications, they won't