On January 11 Informa Telecom’s “Informer,” reported a story in which it spoke with Paul Senior, CTO of Airspan and one of the founding members of the WiMAX Forum. In this article, Informa reported that Senior made significant claims about the WiMAX Forum’s work on an heretofore unheard of Mobile WiMAX profile using Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) signaling rather than Time Division Duplex (TDD) The use of TDD rather than FDD is one of the common barriers to WiMAX cited by many critics, who believe that the majority of today’s cellular carriers will be looking for a technology to deploy in FDD spectrum. The following is a quote from Paul Senior Paul Senior as reported in the Informer article:
"The WiMAX Forum will have an FDD profile for Mobile WiMAX inside six months. We've been working on it for the last 12 months. We've been a bit quiet about it because we wanted to get the IMT 2000 decision. And if we had gone to IMT with an FDD profile, we probably couldn't have got it through. We decided to go for something that was a little less threatening, which was a TDD profile. We didn't talk too much about the FDD work which we've been doing for the last 18 months. There will be an FDD profile, it will sit at 2.5GHz FDD allocations just as well as any other technology," stated Senior.
This was obviously big news; however, the following official statement hurriedly issued tonight clearly indicates that Paul Senior is not authorized to speak on behalf of the WiMAX Forum, and contradicts his "unofficial statements" reported on-line. It is clear that the WiMAX Forum is none too pleased with Paul Senior serving as a source for stories on their plans for FDD Mobile WiMAX system or Certification profiles. In response to Senior’s statements and the current on-line speculation, the WiMAX Forum has released to WiMAX Trends a special statement (linked to here and excerpted below).
WiMAX Forum® Statement
In regards to the recent online reports about speculation of an FDD mobile WiMAX equipment profile, Ron Resnick, president and chairman of the WiMAX Forum, provides the following statement to clarify and correct the inaccurate information presented in these articles.
"Contrary to any of the unofficial statements made recently, the WiMAX Forum has not made any Board-approved policy or determination of when FDD Mobile WiMAX system or Certification profiles will be created. All profiles will be determined by the WiMAX Forum driven by market demand, and the WiMAX Forum is exploring mobile profiles for FDD certification and is defining a network architecture to support FDD. However, no decision has yet been made when to propose an FDD evolution of the “WiMAX” IMT-2000 air interface to the ITU, nor has it been decided what specific profile might be proposed by WiMAX Forum in the future.
From its formation, the WiMAX Forum has always supported, and continues enthusiastically to promote TDD and FDD systems, both of which are encapsulated in the existing IEEE 802.16e-2005 global standard.