Call it what you want — IEEE 802.16e, or Mobile WirelessMAN — apparently, it's now official. The draft of the specification before the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16e Task Group (a subset of the 802.16 Working Group (WG) working on Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks in general) got approval from the Standards Review Committee on the IEEE-SA Standards Board. This is according to a post made by Roger Marks, the WG chairman, on Dec. 7 on a 802.16 WG e-mail archive, and first reported at GigaOm.com.

The standard was actually finished weeks ago on September 22, but had to get the final approval of the Standards Board before publication.

Marks told Wi-Fi Planet that 802.16e, as an amendment to the .16 standard, will be published as 802.16e-2005, not 802.16-2005 -- sans "e" -- as some have stated. That number would be reserved for a full revision of .16, something which is not forthcoming this year. "There is no such standard, and there never will be," says Marks.

Marks said in his archived e-mail to the IEEE that "this action brings to a close the work of Task Group e and its project that began with the approval of the original 802.16e PAR in December 2002, following its development by the Mobile WirelessMAN Study Group beginning in July 2002." He says the projected timeframe of approval in 18 months took about twice as long to arrive, partially because the WG grew from only 82 members originally to 310 today.

802.16e went through 12 drafts and ended with a 684-page standard that received 99 percent approval.

The current 802.16-2004 standard is for fixed wireless broadband, meaning the end user isn't expected to be in motion when using the signal (unlike, for example, a cellular phone user). After several delays, gear is still under its first round of testing at the Cetecom Labs in Malaga, Spain. No actual certified WiMax equipment is available as of this writing. However, many vendors call their equipment pre-WiMax, implying the potential to upgrade to an interoperable version.

Fixed WiMax is like a wireless version of your DSL or Cable modem broadband connection, at best. 802.16e will add mobility to the technology down the road, though there's no guarantee that products based on the 16e revision will be backwards-compatible with 16-2004 products currently in the pipeline.

The WiMax Forum, the industry consortium of vendors and chipmakers that want to make interoperable wireless broadband products both fixed and mobile, can now start trials with mobile equipment in 2006. Some companies are already announcing products in the category. Others, such as Navini, have been doing proprietary versions of wireless mobile broadband for some time -- Navini only announced it would support mobile WiMax last year.

Don't expect any actual services using mobile WiMax until well into 2007, or maybe even 2008. On his TechDirt Wireless blog, analyst Mike Masnick says, "Now that the mobile WiMax standard has been approved, don't think you'll be seeing any actual mobile WiMax for years to come. Companies first need to make chips and equipment to meet the standard (which might not be as easy as they'd lead you to believe). Then, you have to go through the plugfest/certification process, which, if the 'fixed' certification process is any indication, will take quite some time."

Intel to add WiMAX to mobile phones in 2007

Intel presented its WiMAX roadmap today, disclosing that it has sampled the first Rosedale silicon to customers. This wireless alternative to cable and DSL wired broadband technologies was launched six months ago by Intel. The company believes to be able to add it to handsets in 2007.

The technology is governed by the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard; to date, Intel's silicon has been challenged by Fujitsu Ltd., but otherwise there have been few challengers.

In some sense, deploying WiMAX quickly has been seen as the equivalent of Microsoft's realization that the Internet was a viable market; once the firms undertook a head of steam, they barreled into the market quickly. Intel, for example, was months late to market with its deployment of WiFi chips.

Rosedale is being circulated to customers, who have begun building an infrastructure around it, according to Scott Richardson, general manager of the broadband wireless division in Intel's Wireless Networking Group. In 2006, the technology will be built into Intel's notebook chipsets; in 2007, Intel's handheld chipsets for smartphones will gain WiMAX capabilities, he said.

WiMAX will at first use the same 5GHz spectrum band within the U.S. that the 802.11a WiFi standard uses.

In response to a question about possible interference, Richardson said that the 5-GHz spectrum within the U.S. includes a 0.5-GHz swath that will hopefully include enough bandwidth to prevent interference.

Intel's Rosedale chipset includes a 802.16-2004 compliant MAC, an OFDM PHY, an integrated 10/100 Ethernet core, an inline security block and a controller interface. Richardson said the security core would include both AES and DES encryption capabilities that are required by the WiMAX spec. Initially, the security block will not be used for content protection, although it could be in the future, he said.

The Rosedale chipset does not include the radio, but Intel has plans to develop the radio part of the chipset later.

More info at ExtremeTech