OKI, the Japanese electronic equipment manufacturer, today announced an agreement with Alcatel-Lucent to jointly market OKI's mobile WiMAX terminals to the worldwide market. As part of the agreement, a demonstration showing how OKI terminals work with Alcatel-Lucent's WiMAX base stations will be featured at Alcatel-Lucent's booth at Mobile World Congress 2008.
"We are pleased to be working with Alcatel-Lucent, a global leader in the field of advanced communications infrastructure technology, to bring to consumers useful, reliable mobile devices that will enable them to stay in touch with the people they care about and get the information they need no matter where they are," said Kichiro Akino, President of Network Systems Company at Oki Electric Industry. "This collaboration is an important step in promoting WiMAX technology worldwide because by working together we will be able to ensure seamless interoperability between OKI's various mobile WiMAX terminals and Alcatel-Lucent's WiMAX base stations, making both sets of products more useful to businesses and consumers alike."
By joining the Open Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) Program, OKI will work with Alcatel-Lucent to share market data enabling both companies to better define, test and introduce features earlier, ensure faster availability of end-to-end solutions and widen the offering of terminals.
"In signing the Global Co-Marketing and Interoperability Testing Agreements, OKI joins and further enhances Alcatel-Lucent's Open CPE Program," said Karim El Naggar, Alcatel-Lucent's WiMAX Vice President.? "This will enable the two companies to offer an end-to-end WiMAX 802.16e-2005 solution that leverages OKI's leadership in developing compact devices with minimal power consumption."
The two companies will collaborate on conducting interoperability tests to obtain WiMAX Forum Certification and focus on offering new devices, developing features and improving overall performance on a wide range of devices, including CF cards to mobile terminals such as PCs, PDAs and UMPCs, data cards like USB dongles, and devices with a WiFi interface.
OKI expects to begin shipping WiMAX compatible products in the second half of this year, in time to coincide with the commercial launch of mobile WiMAX service.