The recent announcement of a deal valued at $100 million between Alvarion, the Israel based vendor of WiMAX services and OpenRange communication, the US rural broadband service provider will be the largest deal the WiMAX vendor has ever made.
The recent stimulus package has seen a large number of rural providers looking to improve the quality of services and coverage with the help of this funding and this has led to Alvarion expanding its services into the US market and inevitably leading to this new contract.
Even in the midst of heavy competition from other major vendors like Motorola this new deal shows that Alvarion has an important role to play in the provision of standards-based WiMAX services as well as being a major power in the market of proprietary wireless broadband.
When talking about this new deal the head of marketing for Alvarion, Ashish Sharma commented “All the big names were fighting for this deal.”
Many of the investors in Alvarion have been concerned lately with the position the company finds itself in, being both too large to be acquired due to its legacy business and smaller than many rivals like Samsung. These fears, however, were abated when the company shares rose by a massive 12 percent following the new of this latest deal with OpenRange communications.
Around 6 millions users could get access to this service when it is deployed across 17 states over the next five years, covering a total of 546 communities and will be achieved by OpenRange teaming up with GlobalStar, the satellite operator and it will receive some of its funding from the broadband funds held by the US Rural Utilities Commission.
Sharma advised that although Alvarion would be looking at mobile broadband service at some point soon it would be concentrating primarily on nomadic and fixed CPE which it will supply along with core and integration services.
Source – www.rethink-wireless.com