<Note that QCOM has not even trialed the data portion of its 1XRTT technology yet.>
"In April, Qualcomm and Sprint PCS trialed a 3G CDMA 1X multicarrier voice and data solution. Valente said Sprint PCS has learned three things from the trial: “We see it up to doubling our voice capacity, increasing our data-rate capability by tenfold — from 14.4kb/s circuit-switched (today) to 144kb/s packet — and also leading to some improvements for battery standby times."
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North America could see 1X by spring 2001, say analysts and executives. But providers’ biggest hurdle, said analyst Andrew Seybold, is completing meaningful trials.
Several providers are trialing 1X, but many issues have to be resolved before launch.
“One issue (providers) have to deal with is figuring out the back-office stuff: how to route data and handle traffic if (data) grows faster than expected,” said Ira Brodsky, Datacomm Research analyst. “I think that because wireless data has grown slowly in the past, carriers will be conservative in their (traffic) estimates.”
The development of more user-friendly applications also will prompt widespread adoption.
“I have a problem browsing the Web from my phone,” Seybold said.
Until this awkwardness is gone, he said, new wireless applications won’t find huge audiences.
Start-ups focusing on wireless ASPs, mobile portals and other areas abound, but this start-up explosion poses another dilemma for wireless providers: whom to partner with without limiting their future options. Brodsky said the result is providers falling into their old camps: GSM or CDMA, for example. By building bridges of compatibility between these modes, he said, old inefficiencies will disappear.
“You might see carriers in the future with multiple interfaces,” he said. “There still, however, is a falling back into old modes. They are all somewhat guilty.”
For example, Brodsky said that GSM has selected next-generation CDMA without first learning to work effectively with cdmaOne technology. Brodsky said that GSM and W-CDMA providers established the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) to work together.
“Not all GSM carriers are getting 3G spectrum, and some of the new 3G carriers are totally new players,” he said. “So they wanted to bring them all together.”
However, when the cdmaOne camp tried to join 3GPP, members rejected the request, so cdmaOne providers formed the 3GPP II. Its members “seem to be the ones really pushing this idea of making GSM core networks work with cdma2000 radio networks and making W-CDMA networks work with ANSI-41 core networks,” Brodsky said.
Promising Signs
Nevertheless, data’s future still looks promising. The addition of more than 100,000 users to Sprint PCS’ Wireless Web service is “a good indicator that the market could really grow quickly,” Brodsky said.
The availability of new products, such as GTRAN’s DotSurfer 64kb/s wireless PCMCIA-card modem, will drive data usage, he said.
“Users never get enough speed,” he said. “They are already accustomed to speed in their offices. So I think there’s already a market for 64kb/s wireless service. It’s just a matter of availability and affordability. For the market to really grow, we need to see a whole spread of new products.”
One is DotSurfer, which provides rates higher than those of most current wireline modems. It debuts this month in two major Korean cities served by Korea Telecom Freetel network. GTRAN chose Korea for DotSurfer’s launch because the country already was using IS-95B.
“We felt the carriers that have CDMA would be deploying the higher-speed products before the people in the GSM and TDMA world,” said Deepak Mehrotra, GTRAN COO.
Even so, GTRAN is doing development work in both GSM and 1X, and it hopes to interest North American providers in adopting the DotSurfer.
“We will expand into the other IS-95B areas and also into 1X as 1X gets deployed in the United States next spring,” Mehrotra said. “We are talking (with U.S. providers about trials), but really we are waiting for some deployment.”
Earlier this year, Sprint PCS signed an agreement with Sierra Wireless to produce 14.4kb/s PCMCIA cards for its current platform.
“We are obviously looking at them and other (manufacturers) to produce cards that would support 3G 1X,” said Oliver Valente, Sprint PCS vice president of technology and advanced-systems development. A Sierra Wireless spokesman said it currently isn’t working on any 64kb/s wireless PCMCIA cards.
Providers here also aren’t adopting IS-95B, the mode Freetel uses. Mehrotra said U.S. providers so far have avoided IS-95B because they feel 1X is “just around the corner, and they might as well just make the investment (in new technology) once.”
That’s Sprint PCS’ logic.
“Our approach is going straight to 1X,” Valente said. “When we looked at the timing of the two technologies and the cost to deploy them, we felt 1X was a more economical approach for us and got better performance.”
In April, Qualcomm and Sprint PCS trialed a 3G CDMA 1X multicarrier voice and data solution. Valente said Sprint PCS has learned three things from the trial: “We see it up to doubling our voice capacity, increasing our data-rate capability by tenfold — from 14.4kb/s circuit-switched (today) to 144kb/s packet — and also leading to some improvements for battery standby times. Through some more efficient power-control algorithms within CDMA, we think we will be able to get all three of those benefits.”
Sprint PCS has conducted trials with Samsung and plans trials this year with Lucent, Motorola and Nortel. Valente said the company would work on the data component of trials this summer.
“We will be testing applications we have today: our Wireless Web line,” Valente said. “So you will see what we have today only faster and more robust.”
Despite Forrester Research’s recent prediction that 2007 appeared to be a likely target for true 3G networks to debut, Valente said Sprint PCS hopes to debut 3G 1X by spring 2001. Companies and analysts interviewed for this article agreed that spring 2001 seemed to be a reasonable target.
If DotSurfer’s trials are any indicator, 3G data should live up to its billing.
“We could not believe the kind of average data throughput we are seeing,” Mehrotra said. “It is running around 40kb/s to 50kb/s. We were thinking that in a wireless environment, we may be lucky to average between 22.8kb/s and 33.6kb/s.”
Avoiding Misplaced Blame
On a recent trip to Korea, Mehrotra used his DotSurfer to listen to National Public Radio’s (NPR) streaming audio.
“The first time I turned on NPR, I would get breakage in my sound,” he said. “So I went in and increased the buffer size from 15 to 30 or 40 seconds on my Real Audio. From then on, I had no problem. But I would see ’Net congestion taking place.”
That congestion threatens to be the dark lining to an otherwise silver cloud, especially if wireless takes the blame.
“The issue, which is more fundamental, is that the Internet by itself is causing the delay,” Mehrotra said. “It’s not the wireless network causing the delay. It’s because the Internet is slowing down the speed. That makes me think that if our download speeds went from 40kb/s to 100kb/s in 1X, will the user experience be any better? Today, based on what we’ve seen, the answer is probably no.”
One potential solution is mirror sites.
“I’m hoping that there will be enough mirror sites of the key sites (so) that if I’m in Korea and want to look at Yahoo in the U.K., a mirror site is somewhere close by so I can get a download,” Mehrotra said. “Until that happens, once you get above 33kb/s or 40kb/s, it’s not an issue. Once people start putting video through, things may change.” |
