Alvarion Bags $6 Million WiMAX Contract from ICE of Costa Rica
By Rajani Baburajan TMCnet Contributing Editor

Alvarion, a provider of Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX (News - Alert)) and wireless broadband solutions, has bagged a $6 million contract from ICE (Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad), a Costa Rica incumbent operator for telecommunications and electricity.

As per the agreement, Alvarion (News - Alert) will execute a turnkey project to offer broadband services, deploying its 4Motion solution with its WiMAX Forum certified BreezeMAX 2500 platform. The Costa Rica incumbent operator is using the 2.5 GHz frequency band.

The 802.16e network rollout is expected to commence in San Jose Costa Rica and the rural areas of Limon. Telerad is Alvarion's local partner for this turnkey project. The project will enable ICE to increase its network performance while providing customers with advanced means of communication.

As part of the project, Alvarion will offer thousands of customer premises equipment (CPEs), radio planning, system integration and configuration support, maintenance services at customer premises, training courses, and more to ICE.

“We are eager to bring the advantages of WiMAX to the people of Costa Rica and look forward to working closely with ICE to increase adoption in the country,” said Tzvika Friedman, president and CEO of Alvarion.

“We are committed to the growing market in Latin America and intend to leverage our vast experience in the region to offer exciting and innovative options for broadband communication,” Friedman added.

Meanwhile, Alvarion, which has delivered over 200 commercial WiMAX deployments worldwide, is strengthening its global presence. The broadband solutions provider has recently announced that Linkem, Italy’s wireless broadband service provider and nationwide WiMAX license holder, will deploy WiMAX across Italy using Alvarion’s 4Motion solution for the 3.5 GHz frequency band.

Commenced in October 2008, the first phase of the project provides voice and data services to businesses and vertical markets. In this contract, Alvarion’s offering includes BreezeMAX base stations, CPE, and WiMAX embedded PC cards.

Linkem holds WiMAX licenses in thirteen regions across Italy, which covers over 80 percent of the entire Italian population. Linkem will deploy mobile WiMAX networks in both rural and urban areas, and connect all thirteen regions to high-speed broadband access and services by 2013.

TMCnet.com