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To: Eric L who wrote (6253)	2/4/2000 9:31:00 PM
From: Ruffian	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13582

The cdma2000 plea: We want overlay! After months of press release wars, the cdma2000 lobby used the CDMA Development Group's Los Angeles congress last November to state their case against the W-CDMA standard. Tony Chan reports from Los Angeles The cdma2000 case in a nutshell: W-CDMA provides no backwards compatibility. According to speakers at the CDG event, the designers of W-CDMA have chosen several technical parameters that make it non-backwards compatible to today's cdmaOne networks, while adding no notable performance improvement. The W-CDMA camp, led by Ericsson, claims that the higher chip rate provides higher spectrum efficiency, and offers a performance improvements as much as 10% over the cdma2000 proposal. Cdma2000 advocates say, on the basis of claimed extensive testing, that the claim is misleading and simply not true. Qualcomm and other proponents of cdma2000 say that a higher chip rate offers only the same or comparable performance, and represents a concerted effort by the European community to deprive existing cdmaOne users of a smooth migration path to 3G. The 4.096 Mbps chip rate chosen by W-CDMA is not, in any way, compatible to the current generation of cdmaOne, but it was never intended to be. The W-CDMA lobby states explicitly that backwards compatibility to current generation technology would only slow down the adoption of 3G services. Even an Ericsson-proposed “compromise” chip rate of 3.84 Mcps was rejected by Qualcomm as unsuitable. On the other hand, the cdma2000 chip rate was specifically designed to be three times the current cdmaOne chip rate, which allows the two to work together on the same spectrum. The issue is accentuated in the US, where there is a need to preserve investments though the overlay of networks. Lucent' Technologies' manager for government and international affairs, Francis O'Brien, who is representing cdma2000 to the ITU, says the overlay requirement is crucial to American operators. “The fact is the US already has the PCS (1,900 MHz) spectrum occupied. The cellular (800 MHz) service providers also want to deploy 3G,” O'Brien said. “They need some flexibility on how to deploy these systems, and so, we (cdma2000 camp) say backwards compatibility, but the real key for them is to be able to do an overlay.” Several major American cdmaOne operators, including Sprint PCS, Bell Atlantic, and Bell Mobility, have already pledged support for cdma2000, and have told their suppliers (Nortel, Motorola, and Lucent) to move forward in their development of cdma2000-based 3G equipment. The American cdmaOne concerns about W-CDMA would seem to be valid, but should W-CDMA accommodate the requirements of just one country? After all, the US should surely live with the consequences of its own spectrum planning. And with just 16 million active subscribers world-wide, compared to some 170 million on 2G TDMA platforms such as GSM, PDC and D-AMPS, the cdma2000 supporters can't argue from a position of market power. Related stories: CDMA vs. CDMA