CARC ready with WiMAX solution by May

Chennai, Feb 7: The road to high-speed wireless broadband is not that far away with C-DoT Alcatel Research Center (CARC) announcing the trial run of its WiMax Rev-e end-to-end solution while its customer premise equipment (CPE) will be ready by the middle of May.

So far, Intel has WiMAX trials planned for Mumbai, New Delhi, Pune and Bangalore. Public sector telecom major Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has also announced it would roll out fixed wireless networks in six cities -- Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Pune -- and will offer high bandwidth connections to corporate customers.

CARC, a joint venture between Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) and Alcatel-Lucent, is involved in the development of low-cost CPEs and infrastructure solutions.

''The company is ready with the design and the trials will be on in the next few days. We are working on low-cost CPEs but the exact cost cannot be determined now... the final products will be in the market by mid-May for commercial purposes,'' CARC Chairman R Poornalingam told reporters at a visit to the company's WiMAX research centre here.

The company is looking at Mumbai and Chennai for conducting its trials, CARC Chief Marketing Officer Alcatel-Lucent Sethuraman said.

UNI