CDG: Getting On With Business
By Peggy Albright
SAN FRANCISCO--In many ways, last week's CDG Americas Congress was not a
CDMA event at all.
Gone was the usual pep rally underscoring the need to fight for the CDMA cause. Gone
was the international trade war over
third-generation air interface technologies and the intellectual property rights battle
between Ericsson and Qualcomm. In
contrast to last year, when tension over these issues was palpable and pervasive,
nobody this year was hit over the head with
3G.
Those issues are largely settled, according to this industry camp. With CDMA showing
solid growth it seemed time to set aside
intramural squabbles, pay attention to current business and continue getting into
additional markets; namely, data. Thus the
CDG's theme this year: "Moving Beyond Voice."
CDG used its behind-the-scenes meetings to promote the technology to operators
making initial network investment decisions,
particularly the Chinesewho were here in good numbersand to members of the
financial community wanting to invest in
CDMA.
In the general sessions, more than half of the general panels weren't specific to CDMA
at all, a deliberate decision by CDG to
reach a broad business audience, says CDG Executive Director Perry LaForge.
Instead, the lineup featured non-traditional but
future business partners: Cisco Systems Inc., Bank of America, Sun Microsystems Inc.,
Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo!, as well
as the usual wireless Internet experts, such as Phone.com Inc. The effect, in some ways,
echoed last month's Wireless I.T.
show.
The change in focus underscored the market potential that Internet technology providers
see in wireless, as well as the
industry's absolute need to move beyond circuit-switched to packet architecture to meet
future capacity and information
services requirements.
"If you don't change, you're dead," one vendor said. Still, how and when to make those
system conversions is the crux of the
decisions at hand.
One approach, introduced by Vodafone AirTouch plc and Nortel, was put forward to
get operators thinking within the new
services paradigm that is based on an erajust a couple years away, they
estimate-when traffic is mostly data.
Craig Farrell, chief technology officer for Vodafone AirTouch, and Herman Pon, vice
president of technology and chief
technical officer for Nortel, presented a case study of a "next-generation" network
based on a common packet architecture for
voice and data that they say will reduce the cost of data transport to an economy
currently enjoyed by landline. They achieved
this in part by redistributing access, transport, routing and switching functions through an
IP core and allowing a multi-vendor
equipment approach.
Ericsson, at this event for the first time since settling its IPR differences with Qualcomm
and purchasing that company's
infrastructure business, was here as a co-sponsor.
And though the 3G rivalry was largely a non-issue, William Dahnke, Ericsson vice
president of product management for BSS
products for CDMA systems, suggested that direct spread CDMA is still an option for
carriers, even those planning to deploy
the first phase of the CDG-promoted multicarrier approach, cdma2000. His company
created a flexible platform that will
enable operators to postpone their 3G decision.
While that would have been heresy at last year's meeting, it didn't seem to create a fuss
at this year's meeting. Says LaForge,
"Multicarrier will be the more economical solution." |
