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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (17387)	12/17/2001 10:51:14 AM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 196394

Déjà Vu? Handsets Cause Delays wirelessweek.com Peggy Albright December 17, 2001 Clock Is Ticking On Verizon's Goal Of 1X Services This Year As recently as two months ago, Verizon Wireless was touting its progress along the path to third-generation services. The carrier had CDMA2000 1X networks up and running in New York and New Jersey, although it had yet to start offering services. It was offering 1X data services to select customers in Philadelphia as a preview to a commercial launch of its Express Network. And the carrier said it hoped to have services up in several markets by the end of the year. But Verizon is experiencing handset challenges that threaten to push its 1X commercial launch beyond its year-end goal. 'The Verizon Wireless 1X network, which we branded the Express Network, is going gangbusters,' says Jeffrey Nelson, Verizon's spokesman. '[But] we are not seeing the successes we had hoped for yet with devices.' Delays in handsets are not unique to 1X; operators using GPRS have experienced a similar waiting game before launch. But it's difficult to determine whether Verizon's challenges in the handset department are unique or representative of problems facing the 1X industry as a whole because 1X still is barely off the ground in North America. The situation does seem to undermine the CDMA industry's insistence that carriers are swimming in a sea of 1X-compatible handsets. It also sheds light on the potential hang-ups involved in the CDMA testing process in the United States and how they may affect the technology's deployment here. The CDMA Development Group says two dozen 1X handsets are commercially available. The popularity of such devices is apparent in South Korea, where customers bought nearly 1 million 1X handsets in each of the past two months. CDMA industry supporters were careful, however, to cut Verizon some slack because the technology is new to the United States. 'This is really common to all telecommunications, and particularly wireless,' says Ira Brodsky, president of Datacomm Research Inc. 'I think Verizon was trying to be first and maybe they've tripped up on that. I'm not aware of any major snafus with anyone else.' In any event, 1X handsets are beginning to hit the U.S. market. Just last week, Leap Wireless International Inc. introduced 1X voice-only services in Phoenix and Denver, using a handset provided by Kyocera. Also last week, Brazil's Telesp Celular introduced 1X voice and data services in Sao Paulo, using handsets from Ericsson, LG and Samsung. Verizon's main domestic rival, Sprint PCS, already has two 1X handsets on the market, one from Kyocera and one from Sanyo, although it has provisioned the devices to use the new network only for voice, not data. It plans to launch 1X data services by mid-2002. Canada's Bell Mobility, which has helped drive data innovation in the CDMA industry, says it is on track to roll out services in early 2002. It will have more than one 1X-capable handset on the market and will offer 1X services in a broad area across Canada. 'We have no qualms whatsoever' about the technology or its time to market, says Brian O'Shaughnessy, the company's vice president for wireless technology and president of the CDMA Development Group. Despite the progress other carriers are making, Verizon's situation does bring up the issue of what operators and handset manufacturers must do to actually get devices to market. One manufacturer says the handset testing and evaluation procedures in the United States pose a serious barrier to CDMA's success in the marketplace and they are creating an almost unworkable hassle for 1X device manufacturers. 'This is a very important topic that's got to be raised,' says Muzibul Khan, senior director of product management and engineering in Samsung's wireless terminals division. Verizon's situation may involve a number of unique factors, but U.S. operators and manufacturers face several challenges that other countries and other technologies may not, Khan says. GSM, for example, has a relatively simple approval process, in which manufacturers send handsets to an independent testing body for evaluation. The testing body then gives devices 'type approval.' The GSM specifications are more detailed than CDMA's, which helps reduce variations between systems. Getting CDMA devices approved is much more complex. For one thing, CDMA specifications leave plenty of room for interpretation, so networks built by different vendors are not exactly the same. That can present handset interoperability problems because handsets that meet performance requirements on one network may not succeed on another. Pushing a handset through the approval process is yet another matter. The process requires several levels of air interface testing by operators in their laboratories and in the field and by infrastructure vendors in their labs. At each stage, a handset may wait in a queue for its turn for testing. Paul Nitzsche, supervisor of the terminal interoperability laboratory at Lucent's mobile solutions group, says testing for 1X handsets is taking longer than those used for second-generation services, simply because the testing burden is greater. Chris Wallace, who is in charge of standardization for Nokia in the Americas region, says he thinks part of CDMA's problem is that the technology still is rapidly advancing, but he acknowledges that the CDMA industry's system for testing 'is not as complete as it should be.' 'There's an awful lot of technical churn that's going on that's running ahead of deployment,' he says. 'Everybody's on a learning curve.' Unfortunately, that learning curve may delay long-awaited next-generation services.