Q has clearly been humbled in the quest for a single/harmonized standard..
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Ericsson Road-Tests Next-Generation Mobiles
(03/05/99, 3:31 p.m. ET)
By Peter Sayer, Network Week
The quick video call was being made to a guy called Bob, an engineer being driven around Guildford in the back of a van fitted with a prototype UMTS mobile.
As Bob bounced around in his bucket seat, he explained the range of the system was five miles -- a bit better than that expected from a GSM1800 system. The sound and video quality were good, typical of that achievable over a 64-kilobit-per-second link.
However, the day was not without the odd hiccup. As the van braked sharply, Bob lurched toward the microphone. The sudden leap in sound level was too much for the system and, with a pop of feedback, the sound channel dropped out.
On Your Marks, Get Set ...
This was the busy, if somewhat haphazard background to the opening of Ericsson's U.K. test-bed center for third-generation (3G) mobile applications on Feb. 19. Ericsson director Hakan Enquist said he plans to upgrade the GSM1800 to 128 Kbps by April, and later to 384 Kbps. So, it was smiles all round, despite reported delays in licensing 3G networks.
Only the day before, word was received that a compromise had been reached between the European and U.S. factions in the battle to define a single global standard under which 3G systems could operate.
While Ericsson lacks any UMTS research staff in the United Kingdom, it has set up a development center at offices on the outskirts of Guildford to woo clients and help them evaluate 3G technology and the applications it supports. It plans to make the facility more widely available.
The key requirement for the facility, according to Enquist, is that the test network must resemble the final working networks as far as possible. To this end, the facility consists of a prototype mobile switching center, a radio network controller, and seven base stations.
Three are being used by Ericsson in the Guildford area: one on the roof of the Cornhill insurance offices, one in the town center, and one at the company's office in a business park on the outskirts of town. Four containerized base stations have been made available to prospective customers for them to conduct trials from their own sites.
There is also an option to connect the test network to a GSM operator's MSC in the Guildford area. "This is to try out migration strategies connecting models of existing GSM networks," said Lars Bergendahl, management and operations director for Ericsson's UMTS products.
Other facilities are planned at the company's new corporate headquarters in St James's Square, London, and at Burgess Hill, though these will be used for demonstrating applications over fixed networks. This is because the test licence issued by the Radiocommunications agency does not allow transmissions from these particular sites.
Introducing demonstrations of the technology to inaugurate the test center, Bergendahl explained the function of the various racks of prototype equipment lurking behind the blue glass screen.
"The monstrosity in the center is the mobile phone, weighing in at 240 pounds," he said, adding with barely a trace of irony: "We think it is far superior to these flimsy things the designers want us to have.
"It is built entirely of DSPs, so we can reconfigure it, and it has a load of test equipment, as well. It's difficult for most of our employees to carry around, so we have equipped five vans to roam the countryside with them."
And this is where Bob comes in. "We always lose him when he moves forward -- he gets too loud. Next time, we'll tape him to his seat," Bergendahl said.
Similar problems dogged attempts to set up a live video link with Ericsson's UMTS research laboratory at Kista, near Stockholm, Sweden. Viewing the lab scene projected on a wall-sized screen was reminiscent of the early days of cinema: grainy, a little flickery, and silent.
After, Bergendahl said there were no inherent problems in transmitting voice with UMTS: "We are not having a problem with voice: It's the application. It has a problem with feedback."
The demonstration used an off-the-shelf videoconferencing system, Intel Proshare. "It was on the first shelf when we went to PC World," Bergendahl said.
Clearly, there's still a lot of development work to be done. But, compared with technology demonstrations in Kista just 18 months ago, the equipment is already much more compact and reliable.
While the mobile unit definitely needs to shape up before it ships out to customers, there is every hope that the technology will be available by 2002, even if licensing is lagging.
All For One, Not One For All
Manufacturers and regulators have long been talking of developing a family of interoperating 3G standards, under the umbrella of the International Telecommunication Union's IMT2000 project.
However, U.S. manufacturer Qualcomm said it holds patents that are vital to the development of the proposed technologies. It has refused to license them to other makers unless all agree to create a global 3G mobile standard.
Torbjorn Nilsson, senior vice president of Ericsson, said the competing 3G proposals "will never be harmonised to one single standard -- that's impossible. Everyone is agreed about that."
Now the various parties have agreed on a way in which the two key proposals, the European Universal Mobile Telecommunications System and the North American CDMA 2000, can be reconciled.
"We are likely to have one single frame standard, with multiple modes: FDD, TDD, and multi-carrier," he said.
FDD is a paired-spectrum mode, based on the European W-CDMA system, proposed for use in public WANs, and its asymmetric cousin TDD, for use in private, indoor networks. The multicarrier mode is an evolution of U.S. digital mobile system cdmaOne.
By treating these systems as different modes, operating within the framework of a common standard, it is hoped a compromise can be reached.
It will soon be possible to make chips to handle all three modes, Nilsson said, but "This is about cost. I don't see a case today where you'd need all three at one time."
Pointing to one cloud on the horizon, he said: "I don't want to complicate it even more, but there are two network standards: MAP [used by GSM networks] and IS-41 [used in the United States], though they may go away if the world goes IP."
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