GPRS success is vital to industry, says CDMA group
totaltele.com
GPRS success is vital to industry, says CDMA group
By Ray Le Maistre, Total Telecom, Las Vegas
22 March 2001
GPRS cannot fail. That is the unequivocal message coming from one of the mobile industry's most passionate advocates, Perry LaForge, executive director of the CDMA Development Group.
"No matter which part of the industry you represent, it is fundamentally important to everyone that GPRS works," LaForge told Total Telecom at the CTIA Wireless 2001 show in Las Vegas. He said there are too many important technical and service creation factors associated with its development for GPRS not to be an efficient, viable mobile technology. "There is too much at stake. Whether it will deliver on certain data rates is unclear – expectations will no doubt fall back. What will be the great breakthrough, no matter what the speed, is the delivery of packets to the handset."
However, LaForge does not believe that GPRS's long-term value proposition is as strong as that for CDMA, and that cdma2000 1x offers a more cost-effective alternative for network owners that want to boost capacity and provide greater data rates, in Europe as well North America. But he admitted that the prospects of European mobile operators deploying CDMA as an overlay to existing GSM networks was slim because of the influence that European vendors such as Noki and Ericsson have over the carriers. "In Europe there is still a lot of resistance to [a cdma migration path to 3G]…but the operators are starting to become a little more open to alternative ideas, and things might change when they see what companies such as Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless [in the U.S.] are able to achieve in terms of competitive edge," he said.
LaForge is a great advocate of interoperable systems, and is keen that mobile networks provide a common user platform as soon as possible. Indeed, he told Total Telecom that the CDMA Development Group had been pushing for the harmonization of network technology for years in conjunction with major, influential operators such as Vodafone, but that there had been stubborn resistance from certain pockets of the mobile industry, particularly the North American GSM operators. "For such a small group they wield a great deal of influence," claimed LaForge, adding that U.S. GSM operators such as Omnipoint (now merged with Voicestream) had played a major part in holding up any such harmonization efforts. |
