Intel Corporation and King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) announced today an agreement to launch Intel’s first wireless mobile services R&D lab in the Middle East.

The new center will be hosted at KACST in Riyadh and it will serve the Middle East, Turkey and Africa region.

This lab will act as a hub to address the challenges of networking deployment, eliminate deployment hurdles for WiMAX-based wireless broadband, and offer professional services for wireless broadband service providers, telecom equipment manufacturers and system integrators, said a statement.

The lab will also conduct WiMAX client and infrastructure equipment validation interoperability testing, custom studies for performance optimization, pre-certification and experimentation with new WiMAX services and applications.

“Research and development are the basis for future success and WiMAX is especially important in developing markets where wire line technology is limited due to the lack of infrastructure” said Intel chairman Craig Barrett.

“WiMAX requires virtually no infrastructure and can cover large rural areas with immediate benefits for the whole population. We are confident that this lab will provide an excellent platform for Arab scientists and scholars to be innovative in the field of telecommunications and in particular in the WiMAX and networking arena.”

Prince Dr Turki Saud Mohammed Al-Saud, vice president for Research Institutes at KACST participated in the launch of the lab and said: “Research and development, and in particular, broadband availability via widespread implementation of WiMAX are critical to enabling the Arab economies to continue to grow.  The young generation expects and deserves equal access to the tools of the knowledge economy and everyone will benefit as this generation becomes the leaders of tomorrow.” 

At the signing ceremony, Abdulziz Al-Noghaither, general manager, Intel, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, said: “This is our first networking R&D lab of its kind in the region and Intel’s collaboration with KACST was crucial for its success. We thank KACST for the support and for sharing the belief that a centre of excellence of this kind is an important platform for the development of the region and for the nurturing of future talent and industry leaders.”

In addition to accelerating the deployment of WiMAX wireless broadband services, the lab will make use of best known methods from other regions to help stimulate new innovative ideas for deployment in the region. The lab will put emphasis toward WiMAX mobility and broadband coverage problems in the region as well as other challenges such as validation of end-to-end network deployment, interoperability between client and base station and feature validation per WiMAX Forum system and network profiles.

With regional broadband penetration varying from 0.6 percent in Egypt, 2.4 percent in Saudi Arabia, to a maximum of 7.8 percent in the UAE, WiMAX is believed to be the best positioned wireless technology to reach the whole Arab population, it said.

The number of operators that are supporting WiMAX in the region and around the world and the number of countries that have issued WiMAX licenses have been growing steadily since last year. The wireless mobile services R&D lab extends Intel’s knowledge and experience in end-to-end validation of client and network infrastructure interoperability to the region and confirms Intel’s commitment to WiMAX deployment in emerging markets. Intel has already opened WiMAX interoperability labs with WiMAX operators in other parts of the world, such as the lab with Sprint and Clearwire in the US, and is in the process of opening new ones across all continents. 

WiMAX is already a robust standards-based technology with widespread ecosystem. More than 280 service providers have deployed fixed and mobile WiMAX solutions an