The Ministry of Communications in Italy announced yesterday that it has received 29 bids for the auction of 3.5GHz WiMAX spectrum licenses. The sealed bids will be opened from January 30. Amongst the bidders are Telecom Italia, Wind, Fastweb, Medianet Communications, Toto Construction Group and MGM Productions.

Meanwhile the WiMAX community says in the next six months it will unveil a profile that uses paired Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) signaling with separate channels for the uplink and downlink. Currently WiMAX only uses TDD, or Time Division Duplex, signalling, which assigns time slots for both the uplink and downlink signals. Industry observers have often cited the technology’s inability to operate in the FDD mode as a potential obstacle to its long-term global commercial prospects. “The WiMAX Forum will have an FDD profile for mobile WiMAX inside six months. We’ve been working on it for the last 12 months,” Paul Senior, CTO of Airspan, told telecoms.com.