Aperto Debuts Chassis to Support both WiMAX Flavors

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Aperto Networks introduced a new generation of WiMax base station at this week's WiMax World, which takes place in Boston, that allows carriers to support a mix of fixed and mobile broadband wireless installations. PacketMax 5000 can be configured with 802.16-2004 (also known as fixed 802.16d) blades, or with newer line cards supporting 802.16e-2005.

Manish Gupta, vice president of marketing at Aperto, said that it was not evident during development of PM5000 that one chassis would have to support both networks, "but the world will be quite complex for the next couple years, with carriers adopting different strategies depending on the cost of equipment, WiMax Forum certification, and other factors. We hope to be the first vendor to support both from one base station."

The PM 5000 offers high-gain antennas and all time-division duplexed operation, and the mobile version supports full multiple-input, multiple-output antenna structures. The 802.16d cards use 256-FFT orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), while the mobile version uses Scalable OFDM Access with FFTs scaling from 512 to 1024 points.

The mobile cards support 2.5 and 3.5 GHz operation, and the fixed cards support 2.5, 3.5, and 5 GHz.

The PM5000 chassis is based on the Advanced Computing for Telecommunications Architecture, and can support redundant six-sector base stations, redundant four-sector base stations, or a mobile network overlay on a fixed footprint.