The first UK mobile Wimax service is to be rolled out in Maidstone Kent this April by the Mobile Wimax Acceleration Group (M-WAG).

Covering around 7.5 sq. km from the centre of Maidstone, the pilot network will use three base stations operating in the 2.5GHz radio band for the trial.

M-WAG chairman Kerl Haslam said, “The Maidstone 2.5GHz network is the next step in M-WAG’s strategy to assemble the mobile WiMAX ecosystem and demonstrate the business case for the technology." The first application to be trialled over the system would be CCTV, which Haslam said would demonstrate how well the system handles broadcast TV applications.

Mobile Wimax is another name for the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard, with 802.16e being an amendment to 802.16-2005, itself an amendment to the 802.16-2004 standard.

M-WAG hopes to deliver data uplink speeds of 2Mbit/s and downlink data transfer speeds of 10Mbit/s using the technology and said that specific service and application trial details would be announced shortly, and that it would also be trialling Wi-Fi to Wimax handovers.