Standard for Mobile WiMax Official

Standard for Mobile WiMax Official

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Written By Eric Sandler

By Eric Griffith

December 08, 2005

UPDATED: The 802.16e specification for mobile wireless broadband is done, according to the IEEE — even before its predecessor (fixed 802.16-2004/WiMax) has a shipping product.

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Call it what you want — IEEE 802.16e, or Mobile WirelessMAN — apparently, it’s now official. The draft of the specification before the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16e Task Group (a subset of the 802.16 Working Group (WG) working on Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks in general) got approval from the Standards Review Committee on the IEEE-SA Standards Board. This is according to a post made by Roger Marks, the WG chairman, on Dec. 7 on a 802.16 WG e-mail archive, and first reported at GigaOm.com.

The standard was actually finished weeks ago on September 22, but had to get the final approval of the Standards Board before publication.

Marks told Wi-Fi Planet that 802.16e, as an amendment to the .16 standard, will be published as 802.16e-2005, not 802.16-2005 — sans “e” — as some have stated. That number would be reserved for a full revision of .16, something which is not forthcoming this year. “There is no such standard, and there never will be,” says Marks.Marks said in his archived e-mail to the IEEE that “this action brings to a close the work of Task Group e and its project that began with the approval of the original 802.16e PAR in December 2002, following its development by the Mobile WirelessMAN Study Group beginning in July 2002.” He says the projected timeframe of approval in 18 months took about twice as long to arrive, partially because the WG grew from only 82 members originally to 310 today.

802.16e went through 12 drafts and ended with a 684-page standard that received 99 percent approval.

The current 802.16-2004 standard is for fixed wireless broadband, meaning the end user isn’t expected to be in motion when using the signal (unlike, for example, a cellular phone user). After several delays, gear is still under its first round of testing at the Cetecom Labs in Malaga, Spain. No actual certified WiMax equipment is available as of this writing. However, many vendors call their equipment pre-WiMax, implying the potential to upgrade to an interoperable version.

Fixed WiMax is like a wireless version of your DSL or Cable modem broadband connection, at best. 802.16e will add mobility to the technology down the road, though there’s no guarantee that products based on the 16e revision will be backwards-compatible with 16-2004 products currently in the pipeline.

The WiMax Forum, the industry consortium of vendors and chipmakers that want to make interoperable wireless broadband products both fixed and mobile, can now start trials with mobile equipment in 2006. Some companies are already announcing products in the category. Others, such as Navini, have been doing proprietary versions of wireless mobile broadband for some time — Navini only announced it would support mobile WiMax last year.

Don’t expect any actual services using mobile WiMax until well into 2007, or maybe even 2008. On his TechDirt Wireless blog, analyst Mike Masnick says, “Now that the mobile WiMax standard has been approved, don’t think you’ll be seeing any actual mobile WiMax for years to come. Companies first need to make chips and equipment to meet the standard (which might not be as easy as they’d lead you to believe). Then, you have to go through the plugfest/certification process, which, if the ‘fixed’ certification process is any indication, will take quite some time.”

Eric Sandler

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