WiMAX Forum Names First North American Applications Lab

(Business News & Technology News, 5 May 2008)

The WiMAX Forum has named the MAXWell Lab at the University of Maryland as home to the first WiMAX Forum endorsed applications lab in North America. Companies located in the United States and across the globe will benefit from and be able to more quickly take advantage of new applications for the mobile broadband Internet as a result of the WiMAX applications testing and development work conducted at the MAXWell Lab.

"The WiMAX Forum is pleased that the MAXWell Lab is partnering with us to create an open applications lab that will serve the growing needs of our membership," says Ron Resnick, President of the WiMAX Forum. "As WiMAX technology is deployed, innovative applications will evolve to support the demand and new service models for mobile Internet. Establishing the MAXWell Lab promotes such development and provides access to the tremendous expertise and success in wireless communications and the development of advanced computer applications at the University of Maryland."

Designed to be an environment where future innovators from the university and corporations can develop and test new WiMAX applications, the MAXWell Lab will support application testing in a real-live environment at a technologically neutral site. The initial focus of the MAXWell Lab, which is part of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, will be location-aware applications.

Through establishing the MAXWell Lab at the University of Maryland as an official WiMAX Forum Applications Lab, the WiMAX Forum is supporting the development and testing of applications using the high-speed communications capabilities of WiMAX technology for mobile platforms.

In addition to the North American MAXWell Lab, the WiMAX Forum endorsed the M-Taiwan WiMAX Application Lab located in Hsinchu, Taiwan, in October 2007. The Taiwan lab, developed to test new WiMAX applications covering categories such as Voice over Internet Protocol and entertainment, opened its doors to equipment and application developers offering a chance to test their products and services for performance on a live WiMAX system and conduct and measure consumer acceptance before bringing them to market.

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