Green light for VMAX in Taiwan

The National Communications Commission (NCC), Taiwan’s regulator, has given the go-ahead to VMAX to start rolling out WiMAX base stations and related infrastructure in its licensed areas in the island’s northern region.

The Taiwanese operator is deploying about 300 WiMAX base stations from Alvarion and Samsung with an initial budget, reportedly, of NT$1bn ($29m).

Alvarion announced last month it had secured a $12m deal with VMAX to supply 100 base stations in the first stage of a three-part WIMAX rollout in the northern provinces of Taoyuan and Hsinchu.

The WiMAX network will enable VMAX to provide wireless IP services such as voice, data, video and gaming. VMAX is on course to be the first operator to launch a commercial WiMAX service in northern Taiwan.

“VMAX strongly believes in WiMAX as the best way to provide our customers the most advanced mobile broadband services available,” said Teddy Huang, VMAX CEO, at the time of the Alvarion award. “Subscriber growth is expected to reach 500,000 in five years.”

VMAX is expected to use a total of 1,200 base stations in the planned three-stage project.

Samsung, as part of the first phase of the project, is supplying 200 base stations to VMAX. The contract, awarded in December 2008, is worth between NT$400-500m ($12-15m) for the South Korean supplier.

The awarding of contracts for the second phase of the project is expected by the end of 2009.