The WiMAX Forum today announced it has named the MAXWell Lab at the University of Maryland as home to the first WiMAX Forum endorsed applications lab in North America. Companies located in the United States and across the globe will benefit from and be able to more quickly take advantage of new applications for the mobile broadband Internet as a result of the WiMAX applications testing and development work conducted at the MAXWell Lab.

Designed to be an environment where future innovators from the university and corporations can develop and test new WiMAX applications, the MAXWell Lab will support application testing in a real-live environment at a technologically neutral site. The initial focus of the MAXWell Lab, which is part of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, will be location-aware applications. For example, with the deployments of WiMAX in the Washington D.C. area, the Maryland-based MAXWell Lab will be an ideal site to test any applications that run on that system.

“With a community of some 45,000 people at the University of Maryland, this is going to be a unique facility because of the size of the potential test bed and large number of live users,” said Ashok Agrawala, director of the MAXWell Lab and professor of computer science.

“Our students, in collaboration with professors, industry leaders, and WiMAX Forum members, will use the new lab to develop breakthrough applications and services, most of which we cannot yet imagine.”

Through establishing the MAXWell Lab at the University of Maryland as an official WiMAX Forum Applications Lab, the WiMAX Forum is supporting the development and testing of applications using the high-speed communications capabilities of WiMAX technology for mobile platforms.

In addition to the North American MAXWell Lab, the WiMAX Forum endorsed the M-Taiwan WiMAX Application Lab located in Hsinchu, Taiwan in October 2007. The Taiwan lab, developed to test new WiMAX applications covering categories such as Voice over Internet Protocol and entertainment, opened its doors to equipment and application developers offering a chance to test their products and services for performance on a live WiMAX system and conduct and measure consumer acceptance before bringing them to market.

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