Fujitsu enters WiMax market with base station

Fujitsu enters WiMax market with base station

Fujitsu on Wednesday entered the WiMax market with the launch of an outdoor base station that the company claims is light, energy efficient, and the smallest in its class.

With the introduction of the BroadOne WX series, Fujitsu is also introducing the BroadOne brand name, which will be used for future wireless products. The company plans to provide base station models designed for the 2.5 GHz and 2.3 GHz frequency bands.

The first base station to go on sale is the WX300 model, which Fujitsu expects to deliver globally in the second quarter. Delivered later will be a second model designed for transmitting a signal over a several-hundred-meter radius to fill in areas with a low concentration of users or poor coverage, Fujitsu said. The company also plans to deliver a third model, which will be an indoor model.

The WX300 features two high-output transceivers, weighs 44 pounds, and is "the world's smallest outdoor macro-cell base station," Fujitsu said in a statement. Details of the product will be presented next week at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Fujitsu recently entered into an alliance with WiMax-equipment maker Airspan Networks. The two companies agreed to share technology and resell each other's products.

There are more than 50 commercial deployments of WiMax under way, and it's being considered as the technology of choice for worldwide 4G implementations, according to ABI Research.

A recent JuniperResearch report found that the top WiMax markets would be the United States, Japan, and South Korea. But the technology's success will depend on the emergence of low-cost laptops and the inclusion of broadband capability in portable media players, game consoles, and other devices.