Spectrum Availability Looms Over Love-fest
By Peggy Albright
SAN DIEGO—The CDMA Development Group had a homecoming of sorts last week.
The organization that has fought for CDMA acceptance for a decade held its annual Americas Congress here, where the
Qualcomm-developed technology originated. Along with the good vibes and self-congratulatory talk, however, issues did arise.
Spectrum availability and encouraging the migration to 2.5 and third-generation networks also garnered attendees’ time.
Ten years ago, the industry was conducting its first drive-tests in this city to prove CDMA’s suitability as a capacity solution for
cellular operators and to offer an alternative to TDMA-based options being considered.
Now, as the wireless industry is poised to deploy 3G services, the CDG recounted its growth and its prospects. It now has
more than 71 million subscribers worldwide and 27 million in North America. It is also the largest digital technology in North
America and it has more than 10 million subscribers in Latin America.
China Unicom this month finally said it will launch a cdmaOne network to serve 10 million subscribers in the first quarter of
2001. Korea is implementing the first phase of cdma2000, called 1XRTT. Finally, the CDMA industry is in the process of
establishing yet another standard, 1xEV, which promises to provide up to 2 megabits-per-second data speeds when deployed
in a standard 1.25 megahertz CDMA channel. (1xEV, which enhances Qualcomm’s High Data Rate, got a boost when Nortel
last week said it plans to use the technology.)
“We believe this will provide a fundamental shift in the balance of power” in the wireless industry, says CDG executive director
Perry LaForge. “CDMA will become the basis for all communications.”
The latter prediction is already understood, of course, since most 3G systems used around the world will deploy some version
of CDMA. Nor does it reflect China Unicom’s mandate that CDMA handsets include a SIM card that will enable its
customers to roam on GSM systems–a substantial technology compromise by this industry.
Instead, the big issues raised at the start of CDG’s annual meeting were technology agnostic, focusing on how to succeed in the
wireless Internet world and what to do about the pending spectrum drought.
Arun Sarin, CEO of InfoSpace Inc., predicted that because the wireless Internet is a new medium, there will be new winners in
the fight among carriers for that business. However, that does not mean wireless carriers need to fear becoming “dumb pipes”
for Internet service providers. “I’m betting on the fact that carriers who play their cards well … will win, possibly at the
expense of the wired Internet,” he predicted.
Among the advantages wireless companies will have is the complexity that roaming brings to the business, which is hard for
non-industry companies to deal with, and the always-changing wireless standards, which could still thwart any company’s
business plans. “We haven’t seen the final standard yet,” he promised. He said to look for more technologies that will optimize
bandwidth for 2.5 and 3G systems.
Sarin also believes that while the near-term killer applications will be wireless e-mail, address books and integrated content
services, these will all eventually become free to customers as transaction-based and entertainment services emerge. The latter
services eventually will subsidize the entry-level products.
Addressing the industry’s spectrum concerns was Clint Odom, legal advisor to FCC Chairman William Kennard. Saying that at
least 70 percent of wireless traffic will be data in five years, Odom said the industry must come up with enough bandwidth so
that spectrum doesn’t become a “gating factor” that keeps some companies in and others out.
“You should fully expect your government, at a minimum, to feed this spectrum,” he said. The effort is bolstered by President
Clinton’s recent executive memorandum mandating that federal agencies identify ways to free up government spectrum.
In addition, Odom said the United States soon will see more effort to force reallocation of spectrum from low-value services to
high-value ones, where bidders of new spectrum have to pay to move incumbents out. Other objectives include finding new
ways to help current systems move into 2.5 and 3G, coming up with creative approaches to get analog broadcasters out of the
channels 60-69 of the 700 MHz bands, and freeing up spectrum that’s tied up in bankruptcies. |
