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To: Valueman who wrote (5775)	11/26/1997 12:03:00 PM
From: David Andersen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 152472

Copied from the AOL Qualcomm Board Subject: Re: QCOM/G* Date: Wed, Nov 26, 1997 01:29 EST From: KleinG Message-id: <19971126062900.BAA02063@ladder02.news.aol.com> Man, what a lot of questions! Whew! On sectorization: in principle, cell capacity is directly proportional to the number of sectors, assuming a lot of things such as uniform distribution of callers radially around the cell, etc. The upper limits of this have not been explored so it is not known where implementation difficulties get in the way, just like no body knows where Moore's Law stops. We won't know till we get there. The cost benefits of greater sectorization have mostly to do with saving the costs associated with building another site- the antenna tower, rent, landlords, backhaul costs, zoning, etc. I don't really know what the relative costs of these items are compared to the equipment costs. As for the equipment, as the number of antennas on the tower grow, so will the number of receivers, transmitters, coax cables, etc and to first order so will the number of channel units increase directly with the capacity increase. There will be some reduction in number of channel units required because (with the proper equipment architecture) individual channel units can be used on any sector, not just one. Thus the number of spares required is reduced, and the number of channel units required to avoid blocking due to running out of channel cards can also be reduced. Likewise, backhaul costs can probably be reduced because of a greater concentration of calls coming back to the switch from a single point. Actually, the key concept here is concentration of the infrastructure's assets. It provides savings in all areas of the system, compared to other systems that have their assets more distributed but serving the same number of subscribers. This is, in fact, the key economic advantage of CDMA over other systems, regardless of the number of sectors. On the other hand, at the early stages of a new system rollout, the biggest problem (as you have surely all heard by now) is coverage. Capacity effects in the early stages are caused only by better than hoped for market response. Coverage requires a certain minimum number of base stations regardless of the capacity per base station. Typically, the next step in increasing base station capacity is to increase the number of RF carrier frequencies from one to whatever is required to meet the demand. Increasing the number of sectors to six also has the effect of improving the coverage of the base station due to the doubling of the antenna gain. Hence, it may make sense to double up the sectors early on to improve the coverage (if coverage is a problem) rather than simply increasing the number of frequencies. The cell hardware required would be essentially the same for either approach, except for the additional antennas and coax cables. I don't really know why Motorola chose this time to introduce six sector cells in cellular and PCS systems but the reasons you suggest area all plausible. But in Motorola's system it may be easier for them to make the software do the six way sector handoff than to do the frequency handoff required in the alternative. But whatever the reason, it's great news for phone makers. You're right, I can't talk about 3G systems. Let's just say that there are an unlimited number of wrong solutions to any problem. The IS-95 system has now been proven to be a right answer to the problem of CDMA cellular. Natural evolutions of this system will meet the demand for new data services. Will W-CDMA also prove to be a right answer or will it be just another of the unlimited number of wrong anwers? The odds don't look too promising. Klein Gilhousen