Found this article at Broadband Week. Check out the last few paragraphs mentioning Sprint and AT&T's ("Project Angel") wireless local loop efforts.
Weekly Edition for May 4, 1998:
PCS Cos. Eye Wireless High-Speed Data
By FRED DAWSON
A combination of advances in fixed-wireless and high-speed-data capabilities over personal-communications-services networks is fueling the development of a new force to be reckoned with on cable's advanced-services horizon.
Today, PCS operators are highly focused on delivering low-priced mobile-voice services in competition with cellular. But many are also looking beyond this foundation-building phase to the long-term benefits of adding high-speed data as a fixed -- as well as a mobile -- service component to their offerings.
Several alliances of vendors and operators around the globe are working on various approaches to what is known as "third-generation" PCS, for deployments starting as early as 2000. And some players operating over the CDMA (code-division multiple access) platform are pursuing "pre-3G" approaches that include much higher data rates than previously reported.
"We're not ready to talk about specific data rates, but we're looking at something much faster than 64 kilobits per second that will be simple and less costly to implement than 3G systems," said Perry LaForge, executive director of the CDMA Development Group, which is working with vendors and operators to create a standardized approach to third-generation systems.
The 64-kbps data rate, which is well beyond anything currently available over mobile networks, has been under development as a standardized, software-only upgrade option over CDMA that will be ready for deployment later this year.
But rapid advances in base-station chips known as digital-signal processors have raised the bar on what can be done within the 1.25 megahertz that is allocated to each CDMA channel. This is making it possible to implement data rates of more than 100 kbps with simple line-card upgrades in existing base stations.
Further out, the 3G options -- requiring base-station upgrades to 5-MHz channelization -- will offer bidirectional data rates of 2 megabits per second over fixed links and 384 kbps for mobile users. The timing of availability of all these options heavily depends on demand from PCS providers. They remain divided over which approaches represent the best strategy for moving beyond current data capabilities, which now top out at 14.4 kbps in the few instances where such services are even available.
Some players, such as AirTouch Communications Inc., the provider of cellular and PCS services that was spun off from Pacific Bell two years ago, are leaning toward moving rapidly to pre-3G data rates, while others, such as Sprint PCS, are content to wait for full-3G implementation.
Because the line-card-upgrade option of 100-plus kbps has yet to be publicly announced, it remains to be seen what level of carrier support that approach will elicit.
Whichever approaches they're taking, it is clear that PCS providers (and cellular providers that are converting to PCS-like digital technology) will soon have to make more advanced features available. These include data, which must be a part of their offerings if they are to avoid the consequences of cutthroat price wars in the voice-only service arena, noted David Berndt, a telecommunications analyst for The Yankee Group.
In its latest analysis of price trends, the consulting concern found that prices in North America for the average user of mobile-cellular and PCS services had dropped 16 percent during 1997, while in the largest markets -- New York and Los Angeles -- competition led to declines of 63 percent and 64 percent, respectively.
"The PCS carriers have spent billions of dollars to obtain spectrum and to put their infrastructures in place to get to the point where they can offer voice service to the mass-consumer market," Berndt said. "They talk about serving the needs of corporate customers with specialized services, adding data services and the like, but the bottom line is that their sales forces are focused on signing up as many voice customers as they can find."
This voice-only focus is about to change, Berndt and others said. The Yankee Group anticipated that feature enhancements -- such as call-waiting and forwarding, caller ID, voice-activated dialing and personal-number service -- will contribute $773 million in revenues by 2002, compared with $98 million a year ago. And these numbers don't include data revenues, which will surge, as well, The Yankee Group said.
In the case of CDMA providers, rapid growth -- which, by industry estimates, has brought the customer base to more than 1.4 million from fewer than 200,000 a year ago -- has vindicated a marketing strategy based on price and quality, LaForge said.
But, he added, "at some point, everybody copies everybody else, and you're dealing with a kind of commodity situation. Starting around July, we're going to see a lot more pressure on providers to come up with additional ways to differentiate their services, and that's where data will begin to play an important role."
While data over mobile networks has been a nonstarter to this point, there are plenty of reasons to assume that the market is ready to embrace services that can be easily used at low cost, said Stuart Taylor, senior manager in the communications-strategy group at Andersen Consulting Inc.
"One of the major trends that we see is that businesses are trying to integrate wireless communications more into their overall operations," Taylor said. "Data will be a big part of that integration, given what we're seeing in corporate use of Intranets and other forms of data communications."
As wireless, like the laptop personal computer, moves from being an individual user's purchasing choice to becoming a requirement of the workplace, the purchasing decision will move to the company, just as it has with the laptop, Taylor noted.
"Carriers will have a strong incentive to provide the features that the industry is looking for, because these purchases will greatly reduce the churn that comes with individual purchases," he said.
The business need for wireless data is definitely intensifying, agreed Michael Reene, general manager for IBM Corp.'s telecommunications and media-industries group in North America.
"Just as everyone was getting used to the idea that data was overhyped as a wireless application, wireless data is getting ready to take off," he said. "We're adjusting our strategies accordingly."
For IBM, that means getting around the current low-data-rate environment by offering a highly compressed connection that requires a proprietary dialer to be installed in customers' modems. This allows users to connect at what appear to be higher data rates to the firm's points of presence over a variety of air interfaces.
The service, dubbed "IBM To Go.data," with prospective price tags in the range of $50 to $100 per month, was in trial most of last year, and it is close to commercial availability over most carriers' networks, said Randall McComas, a manager within Reene's group.
"We've been charging $100 [per month] in the trials to make sure that we only get people who really need the service, and no one in the pilot projects is willing to give it back to us," McComas said.
Demand for high-speed-data solutions has pushed telecommunications-equipment suppliers into action, after a long period of laconic support for next-generation ideas, said Bo Piekarski, vice president for business development and strategic marketing in the wireless-communications division of Ericsson Inc.
"Access to the Internet has become a mass-market phenomenon, which changes how wireless operators perceive the importance of data in their ability to compete," Piekarski said. "We're all working on ways to improve the data rates within all air-interface categories, one step at a time."
Sprint PCS recently committed to begin trials of third-generation facilities supporting data transport all the way into the multimegabit range "no later than 2000," with commercial deployment to follow "quickly."
At the same time, the carrier -- a partnership between Sprint Corp., Tele-Communications Inc., Comcast Corp. and Cox Communications Inc. -- is continuing with preparations to use a portion of its 30 MHz of spectrum to provide fixed services in direct competition with wireline carriers, officials said.
Sprint PCS, with the largest CDMA footprint in North America, could have a big impact on the pace of 3G development, LaForge noted.
"Its initiative [with Lucent Technologies, Nortel, Motorola Inc. and Qualcomm Inc.] says that people are serious about wideband CDMA," he said.
Prospects for reaching agreement on a next-generation standard improved considerably in late February, with a decision by the CDG and the GSM (global system for mobile communications) community to work together on developing a platform that will work with both types of air interfaces. LaForge said the Sprint PCS initiative should expedite, rather than conflict with, these efforts, even though tests of the Sprint system are likely to begin before a standard is completed.
The first instance of implementation of the wideband-CDMA capability in a pre-standard iteration can be found in Japan. There, wireless-service provider NTT DoCoMo is working with Lucent, Ericsson, Motorola and other vendors to bring multimedia services to market by next year.
Ericsson last month became the first vendor to deliver an experimental next-generation system, which DoCoMo officials said will be used to test delivery of two-way 384-kbps data services starting this month.
AirTouch, not content to wait for 3G capabilities, is pushing vendors to deliver the software that will enable 64-kbps data service over existing base stations, said Craig Farrill, vice president for strategic technology at AirTouch, which is partnered with Bell Atlantic Corp. and U S West Inc. in PrimeCo Personal Communications L.P.
"We've been driving the standard pretty hard," Farrill said, suggesting that the company will start out offering 14.4-kbps service around the end of the year, before moving to 64 kbps sometime in mid 1999.
"We're looking at providing a range of service categories, such as Internet access, Intranet for businesses, multimedia entertainment, business transactions and telemetry," Farrill said. "People don't ask for data access: They ask for specific services."
As far as challenging cable's high-speed-data thrust is concerned, the trend to watch is the application of the next-generation wireless-data capabilities over fixed links, such as what Sprint PCS is working on in a quiet initiative that has largely gone unnoticed in its pursuit of nationwide mobile-service rollouts.
More than one year ago, Sprint PCS CEO Andrew Sukawaty indicated that his firm intended to make use of some of its spectrum for delivering fixed service as a complement to the mobile offering. While WLL (wireless local loop) didn't get off the ground in 1997, as Sukawaty anticipated, the idea is still very much alive, said Sprint PCS spokesman Tom Murphy.
"I can't give you a lot of detail, but WLL remains part of the opportunity that we see for use of our spectrum," Murphy said. "We have a team of people devoted to pursuing it."
Nor has WLL disappeared off the agenda of the other major player to be identified with it over the past year: AT&T Wireless, despite a late start in testing the proprietary system known as "Project Angel," has now run through a first phase of testing in Chicago, and it is tweaking the system in preparation for phase two, spokesman Ken Woo said.
"We're encouraged by what we've seen so far, but there's more work to do," Woo said. "We didn't get the extremely cold winter that we expected in Chicago, and we haven't tested the system under hot summer conditions."
Woo made it clear that WLL is but one of many technologies that AT&T is looking at as a means of local access, and that nothing has changed since the project was announced -- which is to say, no final commitments to deployment have been made. But if tests go well, the system is likely to find a use, Woo added.
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