February 24, 2014 — BARCELONA, Spain — Altair Semiconductor (www.altair-semi.com), the world’s leading developer of high-performance, single-mode LTE chipsets, and WNC (www.wnc.com.tw), an industry leader in the design and manufacturing of advanced wireless communication products, today announced the launch of a new router designed to offer high-speed internet connectivity over 3.5GHz LTE bands in markets where wired Internet connections such as cable or DSL are not feasible or economical.

The indoor Wi-Fi/LTE router, developed by WNC and powered by Altair’s FourGee-3100/6300 single-mode LTE chipset, is one of the first devices capable of operating in 3.5GHz LTE bands 42 and 43, spectrum allocated for fixed wireless broadband access in developing countries.

“The 3.5GHz spectrum represents a high growth area for fixed broadband LTE products in the coming years, and is very strategic to WNC,” said Johnson Hsu, VP of Digital Home Business Unit at WNC. “We selected Altair Semiconductor, one of the only providers of 3.5GHz solutions for commercial products, due to the outstanding performance and maturity of its LTE chipset and software.”

The 3.5GHz band, as standardized by ETSI, defines 200MHz of contiguous TDD spectrum, offering a significantly higher number of deployable LTE channels than any other band. Spectrum in this range is available not only in developing markets such as Africa, APAC and LATAM, but is also allocated in Europe and under standardization in Japan.

“There is a lot of available spectrum in the 3.5GHz band,” said Eran Eshed, Co-Founder and VP of Marketing and Business Development at Altair. “Following the demise of WiMAX and other proprietary technologies, LTE has become the most viable candidate for deployment in this band. We are proud to have partnered with WNC to develop this market leading 3.5GHz product and look forward to expanding our joint portfolio to other device categories in the future.”

Altair and WNC are participating in Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.  Altair representatives are available to meet in rooms 5L35MR and 5L38MR.