FDD WiMAX Plugfesters celebrate interoperability

Airspan, Axxcelera, picoChip and Sequans finish Plugfest with multi-megabit video streaming demonstrations

Airspan Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: AIRN), Axxcelera Broadband Wireless, picoChip and Sequans Communications, leading providers of WiMAX based broadband Wireless Access Solutions and WiMAX Chipsets and Reference Designs, today announced that they had successfully achieved Interoperability during the week long WiMAX Plugfest held in Beijing, China at the CATR Labs.

The Base Station from Airspan, Axxcelera, picoChip and Sequans interoperated successfully with the CPEs from Airspan, Axxcelera and Sequans and was based on:

• Airspan's AS.MAX MacroMAX Base Station, and Indoor, Self-Install EasyST CPE
• Axxcelera's Excel Max Base Station and ExcelMax Outdoor CPE (Full Duplex FDD, Half Duplex FDD, TDD)
• picoChip's 8250 WiMAX Base Station Reference Design
• Sequans's SQN2010 WiMAX Base Station and SQN1010 CPE Reference Designs

Paul Senior, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management at Airspan networks, said, "It is very exciting to see our AS.MAX products interoperate with three other WiMAX FDD-based solutions, and quite surprising that we can support such high traffic speeds after only one week of plugfest integration and testing".

"The 3.5F1 WiMAX System Profile is very important as it is designed to support the majority of 3.4-3.6 GHz spectrum allocated to Network Operators around the globe", said Sanjay Nagpal, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Axxcelera Broadband Wireless. "Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD) WiMAX Solutions deliver the best price per Mbit/s, the best frequency re-use and the best spectrum band usage efficiencies. This interoperability test has shown that FDD WiMAX is ready for mass deployment in 2006".

Rupert Baines, Vice President of Marketing at picoChip said, "Our flexible, Software Defined Radio enabled us to rapidly adapt as we worked through the different stages of Interoperability Testing. Having achieved this baseline interoperability we now look forward to adding in the more advanced features at the next plugfest in 2006".

Bernard Aboussouan, VP Marketing & Business Development, SEQUANS Communications concluded, "We are excited by the outcome of the Beijing event, having demonstrated that products based on our Base Station and CPE System-On-Chip (SoCs) can interoperate with products from leading system vendors in FDD as well as in TDD mode. We are confident that WIMAX Forum Certification for FDD-based products will be achieved very quickly ".