White Paper: The WiMAX Forum Certified Program

By the WiMAX Forum

WiMAX™ technology will make mobile broadband widely available on a large variety of devices and affordable to the mass market. Cutting-edge performance, high spectral efficiency, and interoperability make WiMAX the technology best positioned to meet the rapidly growing demand for mobile broadband services in the market today.

The WiMAX Forum Certified program plays an essential role in enabling and accelerating the adoption of WiMAX products and services. It ensures that subscriber devices from any manufacturer work in any network, provided that the devices and the base stations are WiMAX Forum CertifiedTM under the same certification profile.

Subscribers will enjoy the freedom to buy any WiMAX device from the retail source of their choice with the confidence that, when they switch it on, they will see all the available networks and will be able to connect to the one they prefer. Certified products strengthen the WiMAX business model. Operators rely on certification to know that devices in the market will bring high-quality subscriber experience straight out of the box, and that they will seamlessly work within their networks, without causing any disruption.

The WiMAX Forum has developed a certification program that extensively tests subscriber devices and base stations to ensure that they conform to the standards, perform as expected, and interoperate with equipment from other vendors. This was made possible through extensive collaborations with standards-setting organizations such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), testing labs, and the 530 WiMAX Forum member companies that today form a robust and diverse global ecosystem for WiMAX. Certification is the core of WiMAX Forum activities. Having strong ties with the industry but independence from individual players, the WiMAX Forum has established and is committed to further developing the robust certification program that the marketplace needs. Today certification focuses on conformance to the standard at the Physical (PHY) and Media Access Control (MAC) layers, and on interoperability. In the future, certification testing will be expanded to include radiated performance, conformance above the MAC layer, and interoperability with core network elements.