MicroMAX is a complete standalone base station, sharing the same system architecture as our tried and tested ASWipLL product line.

The MicroMAX base station is highly modular in design and consists of two main components: the all-outdoor Base Station Radios (BSR) and the indoor aggregator Base Station Distribution Unit (BSDU), or the single channel Data Adaptor.

Each base station site can contain up to 16 BSRs, depending on the amount of available spectrum.

Each BSR is connected to the BSDU via a 100BaseT interface operating over a CAT5 cable, which carries both data and power. Easc BSDU can support up to 8 BSRs.

MicroMAX is designed to support lower density, rural broadband access, enterprise applications and DSL in-fill scenarios in both licensed (3.5GHz) and unlicensed (5.8GHz) bands.

One of the key features of the MicroMAX BSR is that it requires less than 28W power, making it ideally suited for those rural deployments where power generation and supply may be a problem.

MicroMAX operating in the 5.8GHz unlicensed band can be used by Wireless ISPs to deploy WiMAX easily and cost effectively wherever the need is identified.

In the future we plan to have an IEEE 802.16e-2005 version of the MicroMAX product.

MicroMAX Operation

The MicroMAX base station is highly modular in design and is constructed from a number of Base Station Radios (BSR). Each BSR incorporates antenna, radio and baseband functions all within the single BSR enclosure. Each BSR can be deployed with a built-in 60º sectorial antenna or indeed with a wide variety of external antennas including 360º omni, 90º, 120º etc. When multiple BSRs are deployed at the same physical location a BSDU can be used to aggregate the traffic from up to 8 BSRs. A seventh BSR may be supported for redundancy. The BSR will support both full duplex FDD and TDD operation.

The fact that each BSR is self contained gives MicroMAX great deployment flexibility. For example, it is possible to start with one BSR and an omni antenna and progressively increase the number of deployed BSRs as more customers are signed up. MicroMAX provides extensive software features such as support for WiMAX specified service classes, full IEEE 802.16-2004 transparent bridging features, IEEE 802.1Q/p VLAN features, and support for VoIP operation. The BSR will provide VoIP call supervision (or dynamic bandwidth allocation) enabling the radio interface to gracefully handle VoIP overload conditions by implementing an admission control procedure. The BSDU provides three main functions: aggregation of traffic from BSRs, powering the BSRs, and synchronising the BSRs by using an external GPS source.

Due to its low power consumption, the MicroMAX BSRs is ideally suited for line powering. In this application up to 4 twisted copper pairs can be used to both power and backhaul a BSR over a distance of up to 5km. This in turn enables tens of customers to be provided with wireless broadband services beyond the reach of DSL technology with an inbuilt cheap backhaul capability.

Point-to-Point applications are also supported by the use of a single MicroMAX BSR coupled with a single ProST.

This arrangement provides a very low cost solution for medium speed IP backhaul.

MicroMAX fully supports the extensive QoS characteristics of the 802.16 radio interface, including full support for UGS, rtPS, nrtPS and BE services classes.

MicroMAX is managed by Netspan, the SNMP based central element management platform.