»www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20040123S0070

With a freshly updated 802.16a standard in hand, vendors from the WiMAX Forum laid out an ambitious road map last week for delivering merchant chip sets for the first interoperable broadband wireless systems by the end of the year. But the forum's vision of a booming market for high-bandwidth, low-cost systems faces huge design, testing, regulatory and market hurdles.

To overcome them, the group of 68 mostly small OEMs will have to transform this relatively small, fragmented and proprietary sector into one that could compete against digital subscriber line, cable and third-generation cellular in a spate of applications.