WiMAX certification announcement nears

The WiMAX Forum will not announce its first WiMAX Forum-Certified products by the end of 2005, the goal the forum has been targeting in public statements. However, Mo Shakouri, vice president of marketing at the WiMAX Forum, said that while the announcement identifying the first certified products will not happen until early in the new year, certification testing itself will finished by the end of the year.

"We'll be finishing as we planned by the end of the year, with maybe a little bit to do at the very beginning fo the year before put out the press release," Shakouri said. "We will do the public announcement in mid-January, so from that perspective, there is no delay."

The IDG News Service had first reported this morning that the forum likely will make the announcement about the first wave of certifications at next month's WCA International Symposium and Business Expo, Jan. 17-20 in San Jose, Calif. Certification testing on products complying with the 802.16-2004 Fixed WiMAX protocol has been ongoing since this past summer at Cetecom Laboratories in Malaga, Spain.

Meanwhile, in other WiMAX-related news, IMS Research has put out a report suggesting that total subscribership for Mobile WiMAX--based on the recently approved 802.16e (also called 802.16-2005) standard--may be lower over the next several years than the technology's proponents believe. The report, called "The World Cellular Infrastructure Report--6th Edition," predicts the number of Mobile WiMAX subscribers globally in 2010 to total 13 million.