NextWave Wireless Teams with Alcatel-Lucent on Development of Next-Generation WiMAX Broadcast Solution
(Business News & Technology News, 13 Mar 2008)
NextWave Wireless Inc. has entered into a strategic agreement with Alcatel-Lucent to develop advanced WiMAX broadcast solutions for mobile operators worldwide. Under the agreement, Alcatel-Lucent will integrate NextWave's recently announced MXtv technology into its WiMAX solutions portfolio, based on the 802.16e-2005 (Rev-e) standard. The two companies plan to perform a series of interoperability tests with Alcatel-Lucent's commercial WiMAX infrastructure starting in the second quarter of 2008.
Designed to provide WiMAX mobile network operators with a cost-effective and spectrum-efficient solution to tap into the expanding market for mobile TV and broadcast services, MXtv provides fully-integrated broadcast and unicast of voice, data and rich media over each individual stream. To complement the inclusion of its MXtv technology into Alcatel-Lucent's WiMAX network platform, NextWave's MXtv technology has also been integrated into its low-power, Wave 2 compliant NW2000 series WiMAX subscriber device System-on-a-Chip (SoC). The NW2000 series SoC is currently being integrated into a wide range of devices with certain device availability planned for second half of 2008.
To further drive the acceleration of WiMAX services at the device layer, NextWave's next-generation family of "No-Compromise" WiMAX semiconductors has integrated the required hardware accelerators to support MXtv technology. NextWave's fully integrated Wi-Fi/WiMAX SoC with advanced 65nm CMOS process technology has incorporated numerous innovations to improve performance, and reduce power consumption. It is also designed to support bandwidth-intensive mobile multimedia applications such as video conferencing and video streaming as well as Quality-of-Service (QoS) sensitive applications such as Voice-over-IP (VoIP). In addition, NextWave's next-generation RFIC, also available in 2008, is designed to support seamless operation and roaming across worldwide WiMAX frequencies, with either TDD or FDD operations, and profiles.