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Mauritius world's first unwired WiMax nation

The tiny (very tiny: 100 sq.mi., 1.2 million people) Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius is about to become the world's first country to deploy a complete nationwide high-speed wireless network. The government calculates that the new network will make the beautiful island a hub of cyber business activity, expanding the small nation's economy beyond tourism and fishing. Navini nomadic broadband wireless access will offer covergae of the entire island, part of it rather mountainous and …

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Intel shows unified WiFi solution

Intel last week showed a unified WiFi technology supporting solution. The technology will support all current and projected WiFi standards. Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel's communications circuits research lab director, said, "The variable bandwidth of this solution extends capabilities beyond today's 20MHz to 100MHz and is expected to support data rates higher than 100 megabits per second that should allow people to enjoy multiple high-quality video streams concurrently."

The …

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September launch for Austrian 802.16 network

Austrian service provider newcomer WiMax Telecom will invest $85 million on a fixed 802.16 network using equipment from Alvarion. Six months ago WiMax Telecom paid $194,000 for a nation-wide 3.5 GHz license in Austria. (Note: How about this price relative to what European telecoms paid for 3G spectrum a few years ago?) The company will deploy 60 base stations in the rural provinces of Burgenland and Styria by the end of this year, expecting commercial launch in September. WiMax …

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picoChip secures $20.5M in third round funding

The spirit of innovation should be rewarded, so it is gratifying to see UK company picoChip securing $20.5 million in third round funding. The round brings the company's total funding to $41.5 million. Scottish Equity Partners, Rothschild, and Intel Capital joined previous investors Pond Venture Partners and Atlas Venture to put the deal together. Intel Capital's Sriram Viswanathan said, "Intel clearly believes in ubiquitous broadband wireless communications, with the appropriate …

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Metric: Robust WLAN market up in Q1

The EMEA WLAN market increased by 6.1 percent to $444.9 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2005, compared with $419.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2004. IDC's EMEA WLAN Tracker says that EMEA WLAN infrastructure showed revenue growth of 14.7 percent as WLAN client revenue declined by 10.6 percent. The decline in revenue in the WLAN client sector was due to the growing number of pre-installed connections on notebooks and desktops. During the first quarter, only 1.4 million …

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SPOTLIGHT: Killing Me Softly

Mobile networks center around a digital voice switch or MSC (for mobile switching center). The MSC, a circuit-switched voice technology, will soon be a thing of the past, repalced by layered soft-switch architectures based on an IP core network. The mobile soft-switch in effect breaks the more traditional MSC into two functional components: centralized MSC servers to handle mobile call control, and media gateways (MGWs) to process user-plane traffic. Ericsson is currently dominant in the …

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ALSO NOTED: Janszen named AutoCell's new CEO; Cisco tries to pop WiMax bubble; and much more...

> Eric Janszen, former CEO of Bluesocket, is AutoCell Laboratories' new CEO. Gary Vacon, cofounder and former CEO, becomes chairman and will remain actively involved in the company. Story

> John Cooper has launched a new weblog dedicated to muni-WiFi.

> A new study says that by 2010, a quarter of Western European households will abandon plain …

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