Cisco announced the acquisition of Richardson, TX-based Navini Networks, Inc, a company which offers solutions for the Mobile WiMAX 802.16e-2005 broadband wireless industry.

Navini is a pioneer in the integration of "Smart Beamforming" technologies with Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) antennas, a combination that improves the performance and range for WiMAX services and lowers the overall deployment and operational costs for service providers.

Navini has experience in commercial deployments (more than 70 commercial networks on 6 continents) including the world’s largest personal broadband networks, and strategic partnerships with key industry leaders.

According to Cisco, Navini's WiMAX products will extend Cisco's market-leading WiFi and WiFi-Mesh portfolios. Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $330 million in cash and assumed options.

"Emerging country service providers are in expansion mode, building out broadband wireless networks and are concerned about deployment costs and the availability of skilled resources," said Brett Galloway, vice president and general manager of the Wireless Networking Business Unit, Cisco.

"Around the world broadband wireless networks based upon WiMAX have the potential to add millions of new Internet users who cannot be reached economically using copper or fiber infrastructures. Additionally, WiMAX networks will help drive the transition to open IP-based broadband wireless architectures and accelerate the rollout of new applications and services."

WiMAX, in general, is not exactly a new concept. The fixed version (802.16d) already counts more than 175 deployments worldwide, according to the WiMAX Forum trade group.

WiMax stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access and is a general term to designate the technology based on the IEEE 802.16 standard (also called WirelessMAN) which aims to provide wireless data connections over long distances in a variety of ways.

Mobile WiMAX (802.16e) is the new twist on the older version and is causing quite a stir in the cellular, WiFi and even short-range wireless markets. Most major proponents claim mobile WiMax will comfortably co-exist with other wireless technologies, while others say it will be a lion and lamb situation as more aggressive, reliable and inexpensive mobile WiMAX networks come into play and beat the current technologies at their own game, which is to provide anywhere wireless access to the Internet. This will become more of a factor as cities and towns deploy metro-scale wireless networks and are faced with cost issues of installing and running these systems.