Alvarion artfully crafts its BreezeMax press release to use the term WiMax without precisely saying what that means: There's no such thing as WiMax gear yet, but Alvarion wants you to accept that they're releasing the closest thing to it. There's no certification standard and no trademark program from the WiMax Forum, and that might be allowing a little market confusion to creep in.

Look at the hedges in the press release: Based on the IEEE 802.16/ETSI HiperMAN standards and WiMAX Forum profiles -- that's profiles, not standards. With prominent roles in the WiMAX ForumTM...The BreezeMAX platform is designed to support WiMAX certified CPEs, which will incorporate the Intel WiMAX chip set as they become available in the market...these are "products that provide a path for operators to WiMAX standardisation"...

All in all, perhaps they should have said more clearly: We're not selling WiMax equipment, but something we believe we be so close to it that only firmware upgrades are required. Interestingly, while they say futureproofed on one page, they don't mention whether purchasers would receive free hardware upgrades if the WiMax standard as deployed is too different to allow firmware changes to this equipment.

Finally, while the equipment will ship in the 2004 third quarter, BreezeMax 3500 works in the 3.5 GHz band, which is only available in Europe and the Asia Pacific. Daily Wireless has more details about the equipment. Bandwidth and throughput aren't mentioned.