Telecom 99: Packets go wireless in 3G
cellular debut
By Peter Clarke
EE Times
(10/15/99, 12:37 p.m. EDT)
GENEVA — New handsets and chip sets for third-generation cellular
phones debuted at Telecom 99, where OEMs and carriers said they expect
packets to replace circuits as the main means of network transport by the
time third-generation (3G) cell phones comes to the fore in two to three
years. Jumping on that bandwagon, NEC Corp., Samsung Electronics Co.
Ltd. and Toshiba Corp. all demonstrated prototype 3G cellular
communications terminals with video capabilities, while Qualcomm Inc.
announced a dedicated chip set that will support wideband CDMA.
Preparing cellular networks for the packet era of data held the attention of
Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates and Oracle Corp. chief executive
Larry Ellison. Speaking at the show, Gates said new application suites for
wireless Internet, accessed through the handset, would become one of
Microsoft's key investment areas.
Ellison, meanwhile, said that many U.S. companies had failed to notice that
the penetration of mobile devices in Europe and Asia had far surpassed the
penetration of desktop Internet access. Thus, designing handsets would
mean heavy use of the Wireless Application Protocol in the short term and
wideband packet services later.
"For all our handheld platforms in the future, we assume the packetization
of all services, including voice," said Timothy Stone, vice president and
director of strategic wireless Internet applications at Motorola's network
solutions sector (Arlington Heights, Ill.). "We will have to support legacy
circuit voice, of course, but as the backbone goes end-to-end packet,
voice becomes merely another application."
Stone said that this would affect the design of basestation transceivers,
basestation controllers and mobile switching centers. Indeed, Motorola has
involved several product groups in an end-to-end redesign of wireless
networks in an initiative called Aspira.
Gearing up for the packet trend, NEC has developed a two-part prototype
wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA) mobile videophone.
The phone's video viewer is a separate unit that comprises a
charge-coupled device camera, a microphone and a 2-inch-diagonal color
LCD screen that can show streaming video or host videophone
conversations. The two units communicate using the Bluetooth
short-distance radio standard.
Yoshiaki Ohta, manager of engineering multimedia communications in the
development department of NEC's mobile communications division, said
that each unit was based on an NEC V850 CPU and a DSP core
developed by the company. NEC's 3G prototype includes support for
MPEG-4 video, audio-compression technology and H.263 version 2 for
video compression.
Armed with Oak
Samsung demonstrated live wireless videoconferencing at the show using a
single unit cdma2000 mobile phone with a small color LCD panel and
built-in camera. Kyong Joon Chan, executive vice president of the
telecommunication R&D center of the information and communication
business unit of Samsung Electronics, said the mobile phone is powered by
a Samsung-developed baseband chip, which integrates an ARM7 core and
an Oak DSP core and which meets the cdma2000 1X standard.
Toshiba showed prototypes of 3G handsets and multimedia desk sets, both
of which used MPEG-4, based on a new transcoding chip Toshiba has
developed.
For its part, Qualcomm (San Diego) announced its intention to develop the
MSM5100 chip set to support the 1X and 3X forms of multicarrier
CDMA, and to develop the MSM5200 chip set with support for
direct-sequence wideband CDMA.
Qualcomm executives gave few details and no time scales for the
MSM5100 and the MSM5200; but the company did tip its desire to
acquire technology to support GSM on future multimode phones.
"We have to work with GSM," said Irwin Jacobs, chairman and chief
executive officer of Qualcomm. "We've been having such discussions. It's
mainly a matter of intellectual property and timing rather than technology,"
he said.
— Additional reporting by Loring Wirbel
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