TW-Airnet is part of the Chunghwa United Telecom Group ("CHUT") of companies, which was founded in 2000 to further the development of Taiwan's telecom technology industry. CHUT adopted wireless technologies in 2002, and today has the broadest wireless broadband coverage among telecom operators in Taiwan.
Focused on enhancing its position as an Internet service and broadband provider, TW-Airnet has selected Airspan for deployment of a WiMAX network in the 5.8GHz band in 11 Taiwanese cities. TW-Airnet will use Chu-I Enterprise as its technology integration partner on the project. The initial deployment in Kinmen Island and Taichung City commenced in the first half of 2006.
Airspan's WiMAX products and services will be a key component of TW-Airnet's broadband wireless architecture. By selecting Airspan's MicroMAX base stations, TW-Airnet says it will be able to deliver new and innovative Internet access, VoIP and multimedia services to its customers with greater speed.
"Competition in Taiwan's broadband market has been increasingly intense since liberalization. It is therefore very important for TW-Airnet to maintain its leadership position in the market. We can do so only if we use a solution like Airspan's, which gives us the most scalable and cost-effective tool for deployments in diverse geographical environments and enables us to create a bundled service offering for our subscribers," said Mr. Chen, Ching-Chin, chairman of CHUT. "Airspan's MicroMAX solution is high-performance, cost-effective and easy to manage. It will further help us maintain our leading status by providing better services to our customers throughout our network."
Airspan first announced the launch of its MicroMAX base station in March 2006 in the 3.5GHz FDD band. The base station is based on the high-performance SQN2010 WiMAX Forum Certified base station system design of Sequans, and was the first cost-optimized, pay-as-you-grow WiMAX solution available in the market place, according to a company statement. In October 2006 Airspan introduced MicroMAX in the 5.8GHz TDD WiMAX profile. The company will add MicroMAX frequencies in the 3.3-3.4GHz TDD band by year's end.
The MicroMAX is Airspan's third AS.MAX base station, the others being MacroMAX and HiperMAX. MicroMAX complements the larger WiMAX base stations by being optimized for lower density deployment, such as rural areas, in-fill for coverage holes in Wireless, DSL and cable networks, enterprise solutions and public safety applications.
