What do you think of the following:
(Especially the "solid standard where compatibility problems are easier to solve" and the "I think EDGE has turned out to be a better standard than any of us who were developing it had thought at the time" part.)
Telecom Asia: Two years ago, hardly anyone was talking about EDGE. Now most major vendors are committed to it and operators are demanding it - what happened?
Yrjš Neuvo: People are now starting to understand that EDGE is a natural evolution to higher data rates than GPRS. You can offer many of the same services with EDGE that you could with UMTS. I think EDGE has turned out to be a better standard than any of us who were developing it had thought at the time.
In what way?
I think it's better in the sense that when we first started developing it, we thought we might be able to reach a certain data rate, and now the numbers have turned out a little better, and it's easier to implement, because it's also more backwards-compatible to GSM. The other understanding was that the speed of W-CDMA take-off would be faster than it turned out to be. So it's an interesting development.
GPRS rollouts have also been slower than anticipated, which has enabled the CDMA camp to rollout in-band next-gen services first with cdma2000 1x. Could GPRS have done better to be first, or is that even an issue?
I don't think it's that much of an issue. A much bigger issue is having the applications in place, having the users getting used to these applications and services. They're still in a phase of transition in many countries moving to some kind of data service, so there's no point in trying to do too much when there's no readiness for it. GPRS is the first step, and that provides already higher data rates and higher capacity. But now we're approaching the application era where packet radio starts to make sense, and then it's a relatively simple upgrade from there. I think the discussion gets a little too focused on the maximum peak data rate. You can have a car that goes 300 miles an hour but if there's no road where you can drive that fast, it's not a big selling point for the car. So really the more important thing is to develop applications and get those up and running, so you can create the appetite for these kinds of applications.
What do you make of GSM 1x, the CDG's proposed cdma2000 1x upgrade for GSM operators?
Why would anyone do that? [grins disingenuously]
According to the CDG, the benefits are better spectrum efficiency, handset availability and they can use existing spectrum.
I don't quite follow that. GSM operators use different frequencies from CDMA, so I don't think it's clear how to do it yet. I think there's lots more details that need to be thought out, and in practice these kinds of hybrids are not usually the best solutions. It's really better to continue on an evolution path where there's a solid standard where compatibility problems are easier to solve. It gets much more complex when you bring in another standard. It's easy to say, but implementing it is a different story.
telecomasia.net
- Fred |
