LONDON — Products from Runcom Technologies Ltd, Sequans Communications, POSDATA and Samsung Electronics Co. have gained the first WiMAX Forum Certified Seal of Approval.

The 2.3 GHz frequency band products, including four base station and four subscriber unit modules, were awarded the certificates at this week's WiMAX Congress Asia, taking place in Singapore.

The awards follow rigorous testing and certification at the Forum's lead testing laboratory run by AT4 Wireless in Malaga, Spain to ensure that each product meets strict interoperability and conformance to standards.

Members of the Telecommunications Technology Association's (TTA) IT Testing & Certification Lab from Seoul, Korea also participated in the conformance testing.

"With the first group of Mobile WiMAX certified products now available, we have delivered on our promise to ensure that WiMAX products are interoperable and that operators have the certified equipment and devices to begin delivering mobile broadband services that consumers want.

"Stay tuned. We expect this momentum to continue throughout the year when the first products for the 2.5 GHz frequency achieve certification in the coming months," said Ron Resnick, president of the WiMax Forum.

Korean operator KT Corporation also announced at the Congress its intention to use WiMAX Forum Certified products in its commercial network.

"More than 70 percent of the Korean population is using fixed broadband Internet service and the demand for accessing the Internet anytime, anywhere is growing more and more," said Dr. Hyun Myung Pyo, executive vice president and head of mobile WiMAX business unit for KT.

"We have seen first-hand how Mobile WiMAX changes peoples' lifestyles by allowing Internet anytime, anywhere on any device. Now, the world market will accelerate through availability of WiMAX Forum Certified products."

KT deployed the first portion of its Mobile WiMAX network in 2006 and began full commercial services in the Seoul metropolitan area in April 2007. The operator has just over 140,000 customers on its WiMAX network and expects at least 410,000 subscribers by the end of 2008, covering more than 40 percent of the population.

The WiMAX Forum projects there will be more than 133 million WiMAX users globally by 2012 and that approximately 70 percent of these will utilize mobile and portable WiMAX devices to access broadband Internet services.

Products achieving Mobile WiMAX certification have gone through rigorous testing to ensure they meet the interoperability and conformance to standards of the WiMAX Forum. Testing includes ranging, idle mode, sleep mode, dynamic services, handover, power control, security applications, negotiations functions and more. The Forum says "dozens" of products are registered for Mobile WiMAX certification in 2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz frequencies and more than 100 products are expected to be certified for Mobile WiMAX by the end of 2008.

The Forum forecasts that more than 1,000 products will undergo Mobile WiMAX certification testing by 2011, consumer devices and infrastructure equipment to support continued rapid WiMAX user adoption in the 2.3 GHz, 2.5 GHz, and 3.5 GHz frequency bands.

The organization also said the current network of six labs in China, Korea, Spain, U.S. and two in Taiwan will expand to eight by the end of 2008 with additions in India and Japan to handle the anticipated certification demand. The Forum also plans to open a certification lab in Brazil in 2009.

The products certified include USB modems and basestation devices from POSDATA (Seoul, S Korea); the RNU200CPE Mobile WiMAX UT based on the RNA200ASIC and the RNU2000N Mobile WiMAX Stand-alone Base Station Unit from Runcom (Rishon Letziyon, Israel); a mobile WiMAX basestation and PCMCIA card from Samsung, and two ASIC-based reference designs from Sequans (La Defense, France), the SQN1110 for subscriber devices and the SQN2130 for basestations.