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Technology Stocks : Metawave Communications Corporation (MTWV) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: WEBNATURAL who wrote (5)	4/28/2000 3:27:00 PM
From: Elmer Flugum	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25

The 10 Hottest Technologies telecoms-mag.com "Smart Antennas: Baseline IQ The move from analog to digital cellular phones improved voice transmission quality and allowed network operators to offer users more features. The challenge now, as spelled out by the ITU, is to develop third-generation (3G) wireless systems with sufficient capacity (up to 384 kbps for mobile applications and up to 2 Mbps for stationary applications) that would let subscribers make phone calls, surf the Web, exchange e-mail and conduct video conferences simultaneously. Thus, a need for smart antennas. The move to 3G will require smart antennas more so than in today?s networks,? said Sandeep Chandel, Nortel Networks product manager for RF capacity and performance. Just as the popularity of the Internet is forcing ISPs to increase backbone capacity, the burgeoning number of wireless phone users is straining the capacity of cell sites. Since interference is the key threat that limits the capacity of a cell, the simple, albeit expensive, solution is to add more base stations. In other words, if one base station serves an area within a 4,000-foot radius, then by splitting that cell into smaller cells through the addition of more base stations, an operator could reduce the area served by the base station to a 1000-foot radius. Market research firm Allied Business Intelligence estimates that wireless subscribers worldwide will number 667 million by the end of 2003. According to ABI analyst Larry Swasey, operators will deploy 2.5 million base stations by year-end 2003 to keep up with the growing number of subscribers. This is one reason why Texas Instruments, a leading provider of silicon for handsets, recently started focusing on the DSP market for base stations. Conventional base stations waste energy because only a small amount of the signal reaches the intended recipient. Also, when a base station listens for signals, it not only receives the desired signal but also interference from other signals. Smart antennas, on the other hand, are able to listen to a particular subscriber and deliver energy to that subscriber more efficiently. Martin Cooper, chairman of smart antenna maker ArrayComm and putatively the father of the cell phone, uses this analogy to explain the concept behind smart antennas: Even in a crowded room a person is able to filter out irrelevant conversations and pick up on the voice of a particular individual. ?Similarly, with smart antennas you try to listen only to people you want to listen to, and you talk back to them,? Cooper said. ?Five years from now any new base station coming into the market will use smart antennas.? Companies such as ArrayComm, Metawave and Andrew Corp. hope to either license their technologies to the established infrastructure vendors or sell their products to network operators. For instance, Metawave has developed a smart antenna, SpotLight 2000, that works with both analog and digital systems. It is preparing for a trial of its antenna in China Telecom?s GSM networks. Metawave claims its antennas result in a 50-percent boost in capacity in a CDMA system and 100-percent capacity boost in an analog system. Meanwhile, Ericsson has underway a research and evaluation project of its Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) system with two GSM network operators in Germany. In contrast to ETSI, which has specified the CDMA air interface for 3G systems, ANSI will permit any of the three (CDMA, TDMA and GSM) interfaces.