EION Wireless, a Canadian manufacturer of broadband wireless and products, says that it has been granted Indian certification for its Libra MAX family of WiMAX products for unlicensed WiMAX operation in the 5.830 to 5.870 GHz band.
EION is currently shipping WiMAX base station and subscriber station products to service providers in India for evaluation purposes. During the pilot phase for two separate customers, more than 250 wireless links will be deployed. Future plans for the service provider networks will expand the size of the deployments to over 65,000 radio links.
India is a key strategic market for WiMAX technology. A study from US market research firm Strategy Analytics predicts India's WiMAX subscriber base will reach 14 million by the Year 2013 and will grow annually at a rate of nearly 130%. Furthermore, the study projects initial investment in WiMAX ventures will top $500M in India alone. At this rate of growth, India is positioned to become the largest WiMAX market in Asia Pacific by 2013.
"Eventually, we expect WiMAX growth to be much faster in smaller cities and rural towns. The investment on WiMAX will then go up substantially. WiMAX will not be an alternative to 3G but will be used for overall broadband diffusion in India," said Rahul Gupta, Strategy Analytics manager for emerging market communication service.
"WiMAX, unlike 3G, will find the bulk of its consumer applications in providing fixed and nomadic broadband access in India. Purely mobile usage of WiMAX is expected to be a fairly small component of the total usage. But technological competition will come in the near term from 3G which is being marketed in many emerging markets as an alternative for fixed broadband access," said Mr Gupta.
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