The company's broad product portfolio includes fixed and mobile WiMAX solutions as well as unlicensed 5 GHz, 2.4 GHz, and 900 MHz products.

by Jeff Goldman [August 20, 2008]

Alvarion was founded back in 1992 as BreezeCOM, Ltd. In 2001, the company merged with Floware Wireless Systems and changed its name to Alvarion. Two key acquisitions followed: in 2003, Alvarion purchased most of the assets of wireless equipment manufacturer InnoWave Wireless Systems, and in 2004, it acquired cellular equipment provider interWAVE Communications International.

Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Alvarion was one of the founders of the WiMAX Forum in 2001, and Ashish Sharma, Alvarion's vice president of corporate marketing and development, says they've continued to be a leader in the WiMAX market ever since. "There are some 280, 300 WiMAX deployments globally today—and we own more than 210 of those," he says.

Alvarion North America Headquarters 2495 Leghorn Street Mountain View, California 94043 Tel: (650) 314-2500 Fax: (650) 967-3966 Web contact page

That success, Sharma says, is reflected in Alvarion's financials. "We are a profitable company," he says. "We did some $235 million in revenue last year. We grew close to 30 percent in revenue, and we have a similar projection this year of 25 to 30 percent growth. We have lots of customers… and we feel good about the market as it transitions from a fixed and portable market to a mobility-based market."

Sharma says the company's extensive experience in the wireless broadband market serves as a key differentiator for its products. "We've been in this market for a long time, and when it comes to the performance and coverage and capacity that you see from most of our radio products, nobody comes close," he says.

The products
Alvarion's broad product catalog includes unlicensed solutions at 5 GHz, 2.4 GHz, and 900 MHz, as well as WiMAX products in a variety of bands, including 2.3, 2.5, 3.3, and 3.5 GHz. "Those are the main frequencies that are being used globally by the operators, and not all of them have gone through certification yet," Sharma says. "The WiMAX Forum just opened certification for the 2.5 GHz frequency… and we were one of the first vendors who got certified."

The company's BreezeMAX solution, Sharma says, is the most widely deployed platform for WiMAX today. Other Alvarion product lines include 4Motion for mobile WiMAX, BreezeACCESS for unlicensed solutions, BreezeNET B for wireless bridging, enhanced MultiGain (eMGW) for low-cost point-to-multipoint, WALKair for last-mile connectivity—and a full range of network management applications, including AlvariSTAR, WALKnet and IMS.

Throughout the product line, Sharma says, Alvarion's proprietary performance enhancements offer key improvements over competing offerings. "For example, when you look at the Self Install CPE that we have, that CPE has an integrated six-antenna technology built into it… so it gives you a much better link budget—several dBs, actually—when compared to our competitors," he says.

As a result, Sharma says, while the company's pricing may not be the lowest in the market, it's ultimately about return on investment. "It's important to know what you're comparing against," he says. "At the end of the day, to the operator, what matters is the cost, the dollar per megabyte that they're providing to their end customers… so our equipment may be more expensive than some others vendor's equipment, or it may be cheaper than some other vendor's equipment, but at the end of the day, you've got to look at how much coverage is it serving, how many users is it serving, and how many megabytes it's providing."

Looking ahead
The company continues to be focused heavily on development. Particularly in the mobile space, Sharma says, "starting toward the end of this year, you'll start to see our portfolio [grow] with a lot of new devices coming from different partners… we don't see ourselves as a terminal or a handset company, so we'll be working with partners to do IOT to bring about different solutions that we can offer to our customers."

In February of last year, Alvarion introduced its SentieM technologies, proprietary enhancements to the IEEE 802.16e-2005 mobile WiMAX standard that are found in the 4Motion product line. "We are using schemes like rate adaptation, a scheduler, a mix of multiple antenna technologies," Sharma says. "Those kind of special techniques we are using really allow our base station to be much more powerful than our competitors'."

In June of this year, Alvarion announced an agreement with Nortel Networks to work together on an end-to-end WiMAX solution, integrating technologies from both companies. "There is consolidation happening," Sharma says. "So in that sense, we feel very good that we have the leadership in the market, we have a huge customer installed base that we can work off, and we have a very good name—a very good position in the marketplace."

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