WiMAX chipmaker Beceem Communications plans to announce its first LTE product at the Mobile World Congress this week.
Rather than jumping into the LTE chip market head on, the company's strategy is to produce a dual-mode WiMAX-LTE chipset and targeting device manufacturers planning to include both connectivity solutions in one device. The chipset will also support both time-division duplexing (TDD) and frequency division duplexing (FDD), channel sizes up to 20 MHz seamless handoff between the two technologies and the various global bands where LTE will be deployed.
"A TDD user on Clearwire could seamlessly roam on to Verizon's FDD LTE network if the two were on a friendly terms," Lars Johnsson, Beceem's vice president of business development, told Connected Planet. "We view this is a way of uniting the two technologies."
While the dual-mode WiMAX/LTE market is considerably larger, Johnsson said there is demand for such a solution as many countries will have both WiMAX and LTE operating together, while some WiMAX operators could migrate to LTE going forward.
The company has yet to announce how many WiMAX chips it shipped in 2009, but in December, Beceem said it was on track to ship 3 million chips in 2009.
For more:
- see this Connected Planet article
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