ARM to use Iospan’s fixed broadband wireless reference design

Indian telecommunications equipment manufacturer ARM will use a fixed broadband reference design from Iospan Wireless to develop and sell products to the Indian broadband wireless marketplace.

The Iospan products--ASICs, reference designs and software--have already been field-tested in actual U.S. implementations, said Asif Naseem, Iospan’s vice president of marketing and business development.

“As a consequence, their time to market is significantly improved and we fully expect that ARM will be in a position to vend products based on our technology towards the end of this year,” Naseem said, predicting that the wireless market will expand from India into other regions of Southeast Asia.

Interestingly, he said, while many international service providers use non-standard spectrum, many Indian service providers “own spectrum that is very similar, if not directly overlapping, with the MMDS [2.5 GHz to 2.7 GHz], therefore our current system will work as is,” he continued.

While ARM gets the benefit of Iospan’s field-testing, Iospan will benefit from ARM’s manufacturing capabilities, Naseem continued.

“One of those areas is cost reduction. They’ve done quite well in taking designs from the technology providers and riding down the cost curves and implementing low-cost systems, specifically as it relates to consumer premise equipment,” he said. “ARM is really going to help accelerate the cost reduction on our CPE side.”

By developing and testing a reference design, Iospan has been able to take a multi-pronged approach to the fixed broadband wireless marketplace, Naseem said.

“Our strategy has been to work directly with the service providers to help them with their technology due diligence and hopefully create technology pull from them, and, at the same time, work with vendors and system integrators to put together solutions and sell software to these service providers,” he said.