Cingular Makes an EDGE Pledge
by Jonathan Collins
tele.com
06/06/01, 4:51 p.m. ET
ATLANTA -- Cingular Wireless (Atlanta) says it will have deployed and launched a single U.S. nationwide network using enhanced data rates for global evolution (EDGE) technology within the next three years. The commitment is one of the strongest made by a carrier to EDGE, a third-generation (3G) technology which can be deployed to existing global system for mobile communications/general packet radio service (GSM/GPRS) and time division multiple access (TDMA) based networks to provide faster data transfer and voice capacity networks.
"We will have one technology path and that is to GPRS, EDGE and then WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access)," says Dave Williams, vice president of strategic planning at Cingular Wireless. "EDGE is the path forward to give 3G services with the spectrum we have," he said.
So far, many European operators have looked far more likely to jump from GSM/GPRS technology straight to WCDMA, squeezing out the middle step of deploying EDGE. But Cingular maintains that such a move is impractical. "We have been talking with European operators and we can't understand why they are not looking at EDGE. If you have deployed GRPS [as all European operators are doing], EDGE is the most efficient way to deliver 3G services," said Williams.
According to Williams, the chief appeal of EDGE is that it can bring high-speed wireless data service without the heavy spectrum requirements of WCDMA technology. However, European operators, and many U.S. operators for that matter, prefer to not have the complexity in upgrading their networks that Cingular faces. The company's existing network is made up of two disparate network technologies -- GSM and TDMA. At present, TDMA makes up the majority of Cingular's network, but the company also has GSM networks deployed in a few of its markets on the West Coast and in the Carolinas.
The company has long been expected to deploy GSM in all its markets as a way to build out a single network technology as part of its network upgrade path. Such a move would bring Cingular's network in line with that fellow TDMA operator AT&T Wireless Group (Kirkland, Wash.), that last November announced its own plans to overlay its TDMA network with GSM.
However, Cingular's commitment to EDGE still does not definitively signal a switch to GSM throughout itsnetwork, as there are versions of EDGE for upgrading both TDMA and GSM networks. But the clues are still there. According to the company, above all it wants to build its network around a global standard set to be deployed by the majority of operators around the world. "It is important that the majority of operators go to one standard," says Williams. "We don't want vendors splitting their time and resources working on two competing standards," he says. Cingular says it is already seeing the effects of AT&T's withdrawal from TDMA. "We are already seeing vendors shifting away from TDMA," says Williams.
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