WSJ -- Wireless Industry Agrees to Study Standard to Boost Network Speed .........................................
January 5, 2005
Wireless Industry Agrees to Study Standard to Boost Network Speed
By JESSE DRUCKER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Some 26 wireless carriers and telecommunications-equipment makers have agreed to study the development of advanced wireless technology to greatly increase the speeds offered by wireless networks.
Cingular Wireless, Vodafone Group PLC, Qualcomm Inc., Lucent Technologies Inc. and Motorola Inc. are among the companies taking part in the effort.
Third-generation, or 3G, cellular networks can relay information at speeds far faster than dial-up Internet connections, and even sometimes are comparable with wired digital subscriber lines. Services generally using one of two technologies -- either UMTS or EV-DO -- increasingly are being deployed across Asia, Europe and now the U.S. Both standards are based on the CDMA technology developed by Qualcomm.
But at a workshop held in Athens, Greece last month by an organization called 3GPP -- an association of standards bodies and industry groups -- more than two dozen companies supported an effort to study the feasibility of new standards that would accommodate even faster speeds.
The group called for a study to be completed by mid-2006 and for development of specifications by mid-2007. If that happens, Paul Reid, third-generation marketing officer for the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, said he expected that products using such a faster standard could be available by 2009. The group declined, however, to commit to developing a specific standard.
The companies will attempt to achieve speeds of 100 megabits per second on a downlink.
The group also called for more technology to make efficient use of spectrum, because the use of higher-bandwidth applications tends to use a lot of scarce radio-wave spectrum. "All we're talking about is one more step along that path," Mr. Reid said. "It's much more a case of evolution."
Already, Verizon Wireless is offering its EV-DO service in more than a dozen cities and plans to have it cover half the country's population by the end of this year. Cingular, the biggest cellphone carrier in the U.S., recently announced it would roll out its 3G offerings -- using UMTS -- to the country's 100 biggest cities by the end of 2006. Cingular is owned by BellSouth Corp. and SBC Communications Inc.
"Technology is never done," said Kris Rinne, chief technology officer for Cingular Wireless. "It is constantly evolving to assure we have a go-forward solution for additional customer needs that might evolve over time."
Write to Jesse Drucker at jesse.drucker@wsj.com
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