Cisco Joins WiMAX Forum Board of Directors

The WiMAX Forum has announced the addition of Cisco as a new member of its board of directors. Sai Subramanian, director of marketing for the broadband wireless business unit of Cisco, will serve as Cisco’s representative on the WiMAX Forum board. Last week, the WiMAX Forum also announced that it had added Tata Communications’ COO Prateek Pashine to its board.

“Our board of directors – just like the growing WiMAX ecosystem – comprises a diverse group of the wireless and broadband industry’s top operators, device and infrastructure manufacturers and chipset vendors,” said Ron Resnick, president and chairman of the WiMAX Forum. “The addition of global leaders such as Cisco and Tata Communications is another strong indication of the growing industry commitment to continue delivering on the promise of the mobile Internet and wireless 4G broadband worldwide.”

Prior to joining Cisco, Subramanian served as vice president of product management and strategic marketing at Navini Networks, which was acquired by Cisco in January 2008. Before that Subramanian held various management positions at Nortel Networks that spanned R&D, strategic marketing, and customer planning. Subramanian holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Recently, Clearwire selected Cisco as its national Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) core infrastructure provider, and Cisco has announced plans to build new mobile WiMAX devices for the Clear Mobile WiMAX service for the consumer, small office or home office (SOHO), and small and medium-sized business (SMB) markets. As part of a multiyear network build-out plan with Cisco, the Clear Mobile WiMAX service will be available in major metropolitan areas across the United States. Cisco’s WiMAX-enabled devices for the home include Linksys by Cisco routers and Cisco is aiming to introduce its first mobile WiMAX device later this year.

Cisco’s WiMAX radio solution is in commercial service in more than 20 live networks around the world including Xanadoo in the United States, Ultravision in Mexico, Scarlet in the Caribbean, Max Telecom in Bulgaria, Magticom in the Republic of Georgia, AsiaBell in Kazakhstan and TT&T in Thailand.

Other members of the WiMAX Forum Board include: Airspan Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, Alvarion, Aperto Networks, British Telecom, Clearwire Corporation, Comcast Cable, Fujitsu, Huawei Technologies, Information and Communications Research Laboratories at Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Intel Corporation, KDDI, KT, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sprint and ZTE.

Posted to the site on 1st June 2009