Fujitsu does WiMAX infrastructure

Fujitsu is expanding its interest in WiMAX from chipsets to a complete radio access infrastructure line, unveiling today a Mobile WiMAX base station portfolio targeted at the North American market.

Fujitsu said it would show off both an indoor and an outdoor base station design this week at WiMAX World in Boston, marking its first attempts to break into the wireless infrastructure market in the U.S. While a major networks supplier for carriers in its home market, Japan, Fujitsu’s presence in the U.S. is entirely in the transport business where it is a leading supplier of Sonet fiber ring infrastructure. Fujitsu principal network architect for Fujitsu’s wireless network development group Jim Orr said that the Japanese vendor has been looking for inflection points to break into the U.S. market with access infrastructure. WiMAX presents the perfect opportunity because it is both a new technology with no incumbents and it is based on an IP architecture, which plays with its transport expertise.

“Incumbency can either be a blessing or a curse,” Orr said. “If you believe that WiMAX will be personal broadband, which we believe, then this will be an entirely new technology open to new vendors.”

The announcement gives Fujitsu a unique strategy to the domestic WiMAX market. Though it has no current plans to be handset manufacturer it is one of the few major infrastructure vendors to develop a WiMAX base station and CPE silicon line. It has a already released its fixed WiMAX system-on-a-chip and has targeted mid-year 2007 for its Mobile WiMAX SoC. Samsung is the only other major vendor to work in both the silicon and radio access spaces, but Intel is expected to take the major lead on chipsets particularly on the CPE side.

Like many of the major vendors Fujitsu is eschewing a fixed WiMAX infrastructure portfolio, choosing to address that market with its chipset line (It has silicon sales agreements for fixed WiMAX with Airspan and BelAir Networks). Both its indoor and outdoor base station will IEEE 802.16e products and will be submitted to the WiMAX Forum for certification. While both base stations will initially support only single input and single output antenna configurations, Orr said Fujitsu is developing a smart antenna system based on Multiple Input/Multiple Output technologies, targeted for Wave 2 Forum certification next year. Orr added that the kits include Fujitsu’s own digital pre-distortion amplifier technology, which he claimed had the highest efficiencies and lowest power consumption in the industry.