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To: Jim Lurgio who wrote (6257)	12/12/1997 12:43:00 PM
From: JMD	Respond to of 152472

time to take a break from watching the tape--this from Qualcomm VP of technology: Subject: Re: To Heck with Asia, the Big Money Is Europe" Date: Fri, Dec 12, 1997 11:33 EST From: KleinG Message-id: <19971212163300.LAA07988@ladder01.news.aol.com> >>I'm assumming by "cell" you mean another antenna is installed on an existing tower that already has one. I thought the spacing of the towers is governed by the distance a cell signal can travel. So the number of towers required is fixed. It doesn't vary. If the entire system was built for just one caller, there would still be the exact number of towers if thousands used the same system. Thanks, MikeM (From Florida)<< Short anwer: no, it ain't that simple. There are two regimes in cell design, coverage limited and capacity limited. A newly built system (e.g., Sprint and Primeco) will start out in the coverage limited regime and, if commercially successful, will transition eventually to the capacity limited regime. The cell range is the primary factor in the coverage limited regime. The greater the cell range, the fewer base stations needed to cover a given area. With CDMA, one can design the system to sacrifice capacity to increase the coverage. (You can also opt not to do this.) The only problem with this is that one may encounter coverage problems if minutes of use grow faster than capacity. This is the famous "cell shrinking" effect that has been discussed to death. The fix for it is to increase the capacity of the system in the areas where demand is greatest. I.e., you begin to transition into the capacity limited cell design regime. (Note that this is something you want to have the chance to do.) With CDMA, there are several ways to increase capacity as you begin moving out of the coverage limited regime. Most CDMA systems have started out with only a single CDMA RF carrier. Therefore, the easiest thing to do is to increase the number of CDMA RF carriers in the areas where demand is greatest. This has already been done in the Korean systems and is beginning to happen in the US. Another relatively easy thing to do is to increase the number of sectors in the base stations with high load. This was discussed in my previous posting. Another capacity increasing approach is to increase the number of base stations. This is the only strategy available to the narrowband technologies but it is the last thing to do in CDMA systems. This is not to say that a few additional base stations might not be added to correct certain coverage problems in certain cities, but rather that adding frequencies and sectors will usually occur first. Why? Because it's a lot cheaper to do it this way -- and -- you have the choice. Note that the number of radios and modems (first order) needed for the capacity increase are about the same for all methods. But the costs associated with establishing a new base station site are not incurred with CDMA in the first two methods. Adding frequencies adds only radios and modems which are required no matter what. Adding sectors has the additional cost of more antennas and coax on the tower - relatively minor. A new base station has lots of additional costs. The 10-20X AMPS capacity that has been claimed for CDMA is in the capacity limited regime, not the coverage limited regime. This explains why early capacity reports on CDMA systems have appeared to miss the mark. That is, it's just too early to say what the capacity limit is because the system loading is not there yet and the systems designs are still mostly in the coverage limted regime. Ultimately though, we can expect capacity multipliers over AMPS to be in this range. I.e., the ratio of base stations for CDMA vs AMPS (or your favorite other technology) for equal (and high) subscriber load will be in the range of 10 to 20 (different ratios for other technologies). Present hardware designs will probably be in the lower end of this range while improved hardware designs will achieve the upper end. Another factor in lowering the cost of expansion with CDMA is that because of the relatively large concentration of hardware assets, sparing and servicing costs are significantly lower. A well designed base station (e.g. QUALCOMM's) allows each spare modem to serve as a spare for all sectors in the station. Thus, fewer online spares are needed to achieve a given level of reliability. Klein Gilhousen p.s. You're right. I'll never have anything to say about lawsuits, for obvious reasons.