PORTLAND (WiMAX Day). In response to increasing global demand for the certification of WiMAX products, the WiMAX Forum announced at its Member Conference in Madrid last week that it would launch a testing centre in North America.

The centre is planned to open in October of this year, and will be operated by AT4 Wireless, the official certification partner of the WiMAX Forum. The new facility will “support global certification testing for both fixed and mobile WiMAX devices,” said Luis Fernando Martinez, general director of AT4 wireless.

The process of certifying and testing WiMAX equipment has come of age, and with many equipment vendors now offering WiMAX solutions, global facilities are required to meet the increased demand for product certification, which is necessary to ensure interoperability amongst the plethora of WiMAX products coming to the market.

A US facility is important “to help meet the needs of member companies as the demand for mobile certification testing increases in the US market,” said WiMAX Forum president Ron Resnick.

The WiMAX Forum says that by the end of 2007, in addition to the new US facility, it will have five global testing centres, located in Spain, China, Taiwan and Korea. In Korea the testing facility is housed at the Telecommunications Technology Association, and in China at the China Academy of Telecommunication Research.

The goal of the WiMAX Forum has been to accelerate the availability of low-cost products for WiMAX. “Standards-based, interoperable solutions enable economies of scale that, in turn, drive price and performance levels unachievable by proprietary approaches, making WiMAX Forum Certified™ products the most competitive at delivering broadband services on a wide scale,” says the WiMAX Forum mission statement.

The benefit of this goal is now that a product tested and certified by the WiMAX Forum is permitted to be branded as WiMAX Forum Certified™, which distinguishes such a product from those that are called ‘WiMAX-like’ or ‘WiMAX-compliant’, which are not considered to be interoperable.

The worldwide deployment of WiMAX is largely attributed to these heroic efforts of the WiMAX Forum in ensuring that certification standards are properly adhered to in all WiMAX products. Without these standards and the interoperability of products, WiMAX would not have the international success it enjoys today.