July 9, 2008

Alvarion Earns First USDA RUS Acceptance for WiMAX

Alvarion announced today that its 802.16e BreezeMAX® 2300 and 2500 base stations received USDA Rural Development acceptance and “Buy American” status from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Utilities Service. This comes after months of evaluation of performance documentation and detailed testimonials from multiple operators with commercial BreezeMAX networks.

RUS (Rural Utilities Service) acceptance and “Buy American” status are required for operators requesting federal funds from the Rural Broadband Access Loan program for the purpose of purchasing and deploying broadband systems. From 2001 through 2007, RUS has provided almost $6.5 billion in telecom grants, loans and loan guarantees for rural development.

“Rural Development acceptance of a licensed WiMAX system is something the USDA has never done before,” noted Kelley Dunne, CEO of DigitalBridge Communications, an Alvarion customer using BreezeMAX equipment in fourteen U.S. markets serving thousands of customers. “Not only can 2.3 and 2.5 GHz operators across the U.S. now leverage the hundreds of millions of federal dollars available each year for rural broadband access, but they get to do it with the market’s benchmark WiMAX solution for these bands.”

“We are proud to be the first to receive the RUS licensed WiMAX acceptance for our BreezeMAX solution,” said Greg Daily, President of Alvarion, Inc. “Timing is perfect with WiMAX so much in the news lately and our BreezeMAX 2.5 GHz being one of the first base stations to achieve the WiMAX Forum Certified™ seal. Now license holders of WCS and BRS/EBS frequencies can access federal funds to deploy WiMAX for the first time.”

BreezeMAX 2300 and 2500 form the radio access network (RAN) foundation of Alvarion’s 4Motion® Mobile WiMAX™ solution. The acceptance covers the full RAN solution portfolio to include both micro and macro base stations, the variety of CPEs, antennas and mounting systems.


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