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With scale economics clearly in favor of 2g TDMA/GSM over 2g CDMA and thus, the upgrade path to 3g WCDMA over 3g CDMA2000, I think it's important to keep track of the ways that the likes of Ericsson, Nortel and Lucent are tailoring their product development to meet the REAL WORLD profit and loss requirements of the operators using the de facto global standard:
1) Antenna
biz.yahoo.com
GSM Capacity Booster - enables capacity expansions by up to 250% The GSM Capacity Booster, Ericsson's unique adaptive antenna solution, eliminates any bottlenecks in GSM 900 networks by significantly reducing interference in critical areas.
Ericsson is a major ATT wireless supplier.
2) IP integration
A key component of the industry's No. 1 ranked Wireless Internet architecture, the Nortel Networks e-mobility iBTS will allow operators to move gracefully to wideband packet radio as part of an overall evolution to packet-centric, IP (Internet Protocol) networks for high-quality, highly-reliable wireless voice, data and Internet services.
This evolution is expected to lower the cost of delivering wireless data by an order of magnitude, the benchmark established last year by John Roth, president and chief executive officer, Nortel Networks.
`With universal radio technology, tremendous flexibility, a significant increase in capacity, and substantial savings in both capital and operating costs, this could be the last base station many operators need to buy,` Debon said, `further reinforcing our Wireless Internet leadership.`
Shipments of the Nortel Networks e-mobility iBTS are scheduled to begin by year end for UMTS, GSM, GPRS and EDGE. Later versions will add support for cdmaOne, cdma2000, TDMA IS-136 and UWC-136/EDGE
biz.yahoo.com
3) HTS (High Temperature Superconductivity)
Conductus, Inc. (Nasdaq: CDTS - news), a leading manufacturer of superconducting wireless systems, announced today that the first urban TDMA field trials of its ClearSite© system expanded busy-hour capacity by 80% at a major cellular carrier's site in a highly-populated urban area. This improvement represents a potential revenue increase of $300,000 per year, resulting in a payback of the carrier's investment in its ClearSite system within approximately two months.
biz.yahoo.com
Much of the seminal work in HTS was done by ATT (Bell Labs) and IBM (perennial interconnect issues). I believe Lucent (the former Bell Labs) is licensing its HTS-related patents through a company called BTS and, if I'm not mistaken, is the primary source of technology for the HTS companies being currently being trialed to death by cost-conscious operators increasingly aware that one of the implications of the global industrywide transition underway -- telecom carriers morphing from being highly-regulated "owners of the pipes" to being deregulated service providers -- is the simple reality that price wars are essentially cost wars. |
