WiMAX Forum Starts Roaming Trials

The WiMAX Forum has announced that 14 vendors are participating in the first ever commercial WiMAX interoperability and roaming trials. The commercial trial provides another platform for the WiMAX Forum to aggressively position operators and clearinghouses to initiate commercial roaming services which will lead to roaming worldwide.

“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 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,” said Resnick. “The goal is to demonstrate the WiMAX standard end-to-end roaming implementation that will be replicated by WiMAX operators and clearinghouses worldwide.This includes WiMAX networks which support roaming services and the roaming back office platforms which track and measure usage for operators to correctly settle accounts with each other.”

These operators, device manufacturers, equipment vendors, and clearing houses include Aicent, Alvarion, Bridgewater Systems, Cisco, Clearwire, Comfone, DigitalBridge Communications, Intel, iPass, Juniper Networks, MACH, Motorola, Syniverse and Transaction Network Services.

Posted to the site on 3rd June 2009