Airspan Announces Commercial Availability Of MicroMAX-SOC WiMAX Base Station

Hannover, Germany -- Airspan Networks, Inc. announced its plans to start shipping MicroMAX-SOC (system on a chip) to its first customers in April 2006. This announcement was accompanied by "live" demonstrations of the product at CeBIT at the Airspan stand, in Hall 13.

"MicroMAX-SOC, which is based on the high-performance SQN2010 WiMAX Certified™ base station system design of Sequans, is the first cost-optimised, pay-as-you-grow WiMAX solution available in the market place," said Jonathan Paget, Executive Vice President and COO of Airspan Networks. "MicroMAX-SOC, which is our third WiMAX Base Station, offers Service Providers and Network Operators a unique value proposition of very high performance at an affordable price point."

MicroMAX-SOC, which is initially available in the 3.5 GHz FDD band, will start shipping to customers in April 2006. Later in the second quarter, Airspan will introduce support for the 5.8 GHz TDD and 3.3-3.4 GHz TDD bands, followed by a range of other 3.X GHz and 5.X GHz products in second half of 2006.

Paul Senior, Video President of Marketing and Product Management, commented: "MicroMAX-SOC is fully optimised for Fixed WiMAX deployments using our existing Indoor EasyST and Outdoor ProST subscriber terminals and Netspan WiMAX Element Management System. By re-using our tried and tested WipLL system design and packaging we can offer customers a differentiated, all outdoor solution, that allows them to start small and incrementally grow their systems, by adding low-cost Base Station Radios (BSRs) one by one."

The MicroMAX-SOC is Airspan's third AS.MAX Base Station, the others being MacroMAX and MicroMAX-SDR. MicroMAX-SOC complements other Airpsan WiMAX Base Stations being optimized for low density deployment, such as rural areas, in-fill for coverage holes in DSL and cable networks, Enterprise solutions and Public Safety applications.

MicroMAX-SOC is based on Sequans "best-in-class" SQN2010 System-on-a-Chip (SOC) technology. Georges Karam, President and CEO of Sequans, said: "Airspan was Sequans' first customer, and its adoption of our WiMAX Certified™ technology for the MicroMAX-SOC is a significant milestone for us. The SQN2010 is a very high performance device, and the MicroMAX-SOC will deliver unprecedented performance in a cost effective package."

SOURCE: Airspan Networks, Inc.