WiMAX far from dead in Taiwan

A senior industry figure from the telecomms market proclaimed at a conference in Paris earlier this month that WiMAX was dead. Hermann Hauser, responsible for spinning off ARM, said LTE is the way ahead.A senior industry figure from the telecomms market proclaimed at a conference in Paris earlier this month that WiMAX was dead. Hermann Hauser, responsible for spinning off ARM, said LTE is the way ahead.

But if that’s the case, Taiwan doesn’t seem to recognize the WiMAX corpse.

The WiMAX Forum said today that operators have demonstrated the first mobile global roaming at a conference in Taipei And there will be six WiMAX networks in Taiwan by the first quarter of 2010.

The Forum said that the WiMAX partners including Samsung, Futureinfonet, Alcatel-Lucent and Bridgewater Systems hosted live roaming demonstrations in the capital of the country, Taipei.

The demos included roaming WiMAX users with commercially available mobile WiMAX equipment. Tatung Infocomm and VMAX also demonstrated two way roaming, while Clearwire used international roaming on the net.

Ron Resnick, president and chairman of the WiMAX Forum, said: “Roaming is important to operators today, as there are more than 500 WiMAX deployments in more than 145 countries and the momentum of WiMAX deployments continues with double digit deployment adds each month.”