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To: Eric L who wrote (8577)	12/16/2000 8:37:19 PM
From: Eric L	Respond to of 34857

>> Carriers Forge Ahead With GPRS Deborah Méndez-Wilson December 11, 2000 Wireless week Once people get a taste for high-speed data, they will never want to go back to anything else, contends David Miller, president of MBO Wireless Inc. "People just eat up bandwidth. They love the stuff. The more you give them, the more they like it," he says. Miller's new carrier, a subsidiary of MBO Corp., will serve the Oklahoma cities of Stillwater, Muskogee and McAlester, covering about 250,000 potential customers. It expects to be among the earliest GSM carriers in the country to deploy general packet radio service technology. MBO, with the help of base station manufacturer AirNet Communications Corp., plans to deploy GPRS commercially by March, joining larger carriers with similar plans such as Cingular Wireless and VoiceStream Wireless. AT&T Wireless expects to have GSM/GPRS capabilites before the end of 2001. Carriers are hoping GPRS networks will enable them to offer customers enhanced services, but questions remain. Will handsets be available and, if they are, do consumers actually want enhanced data and voice services? Already, concerns are surfacing that there won't be enough handsets to go around even after GPRS networks are up and running. Analysts say GSM operators in the United States are upgrading their networks with little fanfare precisely for this reason. Some observers contend handset makers won't start meeting demand until the middle of next year and will likely fulfill requests from larger carriers first. Indeed, some GSM carriers in Europe still clamor for GPRS handsets. Allied Business Intelligence Inc., the Oyster Bay, N.Y.-based technology firm, contends handset manufacturers are at least 12 to 18 months behind schedule with GPRS handset production. Because the phones are feature-rich, designers are struggling to incorporate many electronic components on one device. "Early examples were dismal failures," says Larry Swasey, ABI senior vice president of communications research. For his part, Barney Dewey, a wireless analyst with the Andy Seybold Group, contends the technology will spur development of a wide array of data-rich handsets that will command consumer attention. Whether carriers will be able to get their hands on the devices is another matter. Nokia plans to have a GPRS handset on the market by mid-2001. Spokesman Keith Nowak says it's too early to predict possible production or distribution problems. Rosemary Ravinal, an Ericsson spokeswoman, downplays any claims of GPRS handset shortages. If anything, the manufacturer is ramping up distribution of its new R520 trimode handset. AT&T Wireless' recent announcement that it plans to install a GSM network "is going to speed up a lot of production," Ravinal contends. Of course, handset availability doesn't matter if consumers aren't interested in enhanced services. Even with uncertainty, however, carriers are pushing ahead with network upgrades. For its part, MBO is testing its new wireless network and the software-defined base stations developed by AirNet. The AdaptaCell base stations are designed to enable carriers to deploy GPRS technology quickly and without major infrastructure upgrades. Wireless operators need only upgrade software instead of installing costly hardware. AirNet officials believe software-defined base stations are the wave of the future given the spectrum drought. They point to a Nov. 9 report issued by the FCC that encourages spectrum swapping and "advances in equipment that will facilitate use of available spectrum," including software-defined radio, or SDR. << - Eric -

To: Eric L who wrote (8577)	12/16/2000 9:15:33 PM
From: quartersawyer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 34857

^How fast is 1xRTT^ Not known. And if it's all hype, not real fast. I'm a little discouraged by the view afforded into 3GPP2 internals linked by Ben Garrett this morning. EV-DV is indeed more than 6-months from submission. To the degree that 1x is hype, though,I think it's counter-hype. GPRS at 150kbps was pushed so hard the marketing guys had to step in and quash the hype because of the mass of supplicants with high speed applications raring to go. My context of competitive field was that of AWE, not the world. Their attempt at differentiation will be expensive and difficult for the i-mode business model to offset. The GSM overlay will not help their capacity problems (and GPRS/i-mode, if it's used, will exacerbate the problems unless they pour more into 2.5G, not to mention spectrum for 3G and ...) As for "corporate e-mail" as a "killer app" on GPRS, I'm still absorbing today's links, but my impression is that security is a problem. I've accepted that CDMA is more secure, but have no real documentation. Simon Buckingham and another of your links today point to a GPRS security problem, to the extent of interfering with use by the corporate subscribers in trial systems. Not an insurmountable problem, I'm sure. Just there right now. In general, I'm amazed at how parallel, or neck and neck the competing systems are running technologically. Fascinating race. Bets should be hedged among infrastructure providers, but I see no long-term losers among the big players, vainglory aside.