At next week’s CTIA Wireless 2008 show in Las Vegas, Motorola will give a large part of its focus to WiMAX and femtocells.
Motorola announced yesterday that it will divide itself in the hope of conquering its problems within its Mobile Device division. The board of directors has begun the process of partitioning the company into two independent, publicly traded companies, consisting of the struggling Mobile Devices and the more profitable Broadband & Mobility Solutions businesses.
Among the somewhat beleaguered company’s new Broadband & Mobility product releases, is the plug-and-play desktop 802.16e-compliant Wave-2-ready CPEi 150 for indoor fixed WiMAX deployments. The new CPEi 150 features one data port, supports remote management and operates in the 2.5GHz band. The user-friendly CPEi 150 automatically connects to a WiMAX network and authenticates itself for easy setup. The GUI was designed to allow users to easily troubleshoot and personalize their services. The CPEi 150 is scheduled to be available for service providers during Q2 2008.
At CTIA, Motorola will be participating with ecosystem partners Intel, Clearwire, and XOHM to offer mobile WiMAX “test drives” around the convention center. Internet video will be streamed live from the WiMAX-equipped vehicles to the Motorola booth to give attendees a glimpse of what mobile WiMAX can do.
Motorola also announced this week a new common wireless broadband platform that will be used to support both WiMAX 802.16e APs and the Long Term Evolution (LTE) evolved Node-B (eNodeB). According to a Motorola press release, “the new common platform is physically smaller than the first generation WiMAX product, further reducing operators’ deployment and operating costs. Motorola’s flexible modem technology allows the common platform to be software configurable to support either WiMAX or LTE.”
Motorola’s WiMAX solution is comprised of a number of tower top and ground-based access point configurations utilizing MIMO B or smart antenna technology and can be operated in the 2.3, 2.5, and 3.5 GHz frequency bands.
On the femtocell front, Motorola will demo a new CDMA femtocell solution, as well as its first 3G UMTS femtocell, which was announced last month. The CDMA femtocell solution is expected to be commercially available in Q4 2008.
Naomi Graychase is Managing Editor at Wi-FiPlanet.
