KACST to visit telecom operators at Gitex

The purpose of this tour is to introduce to the telecommunication community the forthcoming wireless mobile services R&D lab to be inaugurated early 2009.

The new center will be hosted at KACST and it will serve the Middle East Turkey and Africa region.

This lab will act as a hub to address the challenges of networking deployment, eliminate deployment hurdles for WiMAX-based wireless broadband, and offer professional services for wireless broadband service providers, telecom equipment manufacturers and system integrators.

The lab will also conduct WiMAX client and infrastructure equipment validation interoperability testing, custom studies for performance optimization, pre-certification and experimentation with new WiMAX services and applications.

Prince Dr. Turki Saud Mohammed Al-Saud, vice president for Research Institutes at KACST participated in the launch of the lab and commented:

"Research and development, and in particular, broadband availability via widespread implementation of WiMAX are critical to enabling the Arab economies to continue to grow. We believe that the industry in the region needs access to these kind of specialized services and KACST are committed to make this facility available to the regional telecom community, therefore this awareness effort is an important first step."

Abdulziz Al-Noghaither, General Manager, Intel Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, said: "This is our first networking R&D lab of its kind in the region and Intel's collaboration with KACST was crucial for its success. We thank KACST for the support and for sharing the belief that a centre of excellence of this kind is an important platform for the development of the region and for the nurturing of future talent and industry leaders."

In addition to accelerating the deployment of WiMAX wireless broadband services, the lab will make use of best known methods from other regions to help stimulate new innovative ideas for deployment in the region.

The lab will put emphasis toward WiMAX mobility and broadband coverage problems in the region as well as other challenges such as validation of end-to-end network deployment, interoperability between client and base station and feature validation per WiMAX Forum system and network profiles.

Why WiMAX?
The number of operators that are supporting WiMAX in the region and around the world and the number of countries that have issued WiMAX licenses have been growing steadily since last year.

The wireless mobile services R&D lab extends Intel's knowledge and experience in end-to-end validation of client and network infrastructure interoperability to the region and confirms Intel's commitment to WiMAX deployment in emerging markets.

Intel has already opened WiMAX interoperability labs with WiMAX operators in other parts of the world, such as the lab with Sprint and Clearwire in the US, and is in the process of opening new ones across all continents.

WiMAX is already a robust standards-based technology with widespread ecosystem. More than 280 service providers have deployed fixed and mobile WiMAX solutions and there are more than 550 WiMAX Forum members worldwide. The WiMAX ecosystem delivers leading devices, infrastructure and silicon.

Intel, in collaboration with service providers, infrastructure equipment vendors, and device and PC manufacturers, plans to begin delivering integrated mobile WiMAX silicon for select notebook PCs in the US.

With its embedded WiMAX solutions for a variety of mobile devices, Intel is poised to support the promise of cost effective, high speed "broadband on the go."