Ericsson brings 3G closer to home

Ericsson brings 3G closer to home

Zatni Arbi, Contributor, Jakarta

A couple of years ago, hearing the name Ericsson would give us the image of sturdy GSM cell phone handsets that competed with big names such as Nokia and Motorola.

When its competitors pulled ahead with more attractive cell phone models and left it in the dust, this Swedish company did the right thing. It joined hands with a Japanese company renowned for its design prowess. Sony Ericsson, which was established as a fifty-fifty joint venture in 2001, is one of the strong contenders in the cellular handsets market today.

Sony brought in its indisputable ability to create cool gadgets, while Ericsson supplied its mobile communication expertise.

However, like most other big players in the field, such as Alcatel, Motorola, Nokia and Samsung, Ericsson is not just a cell phone maker, it also one of the providers of the building blocks for the telecom infrastructure.

Because we the consumers do not use or see the products, we may not be aware of what it does, but this company is confident enough to claim "some 40 percent of all mobile calls are made through Ericsson systems."

By the way, the history of Ericsson is also interesting. The company was founded back in 1876 as a repair shop for telegraph equipment used by the Swedish telegraph company.

Its founder was Lars Magnus Ericsson, who reportedly retired and took up farming in 1901. But, almost a decade later, he and his wife Hilda invented what was perhaps the first mobile telephone.

They used it as a car phone as they traveled across Sweden.

The technology was not based on wireless digital, of course. It was more akin to how people here steal electricity from the state-owned electricity company PLN-direct cable-to-cable pairing.

When GSM was basically the name of the game in the cell phone industry, Ericsson was one of those who supplied the GSM operators with the building blocks for their infrastructure. That was not a surprise, as the GSM standard came from Western Europe and was the source of European pride and joy -- and Ericsson was a European company.

However, when Qualcomm decided to sell off its infrastructure business, Ericsson bought it in March 1999. This, interestingly, ended the long-running hostility between the two companies.

Understandably, by adding Qualcomm's CDMA infrastructure expertise to its existing GSM technology know-how, Ericsson acquired a competitive advantage that no one else has in the industry: It has a mastery of both technologies, and its products have become available on both sides.

On the GSM front, this company has products for GPRS, EDGE, and WCDMA -- which is the 3G path for the GSM people. On the CDMA side, Ericsson provides CDMA 2000 1X, CDMA 2000 EV-DO (optimized for data) and now CDMA 2000 EV-DV.

"In fact, we now use a common platform for both systems," explained Peter Lancia -- Ericsson's director of product and system marketing, CDMA systems -- to a group of Indonesian IT journalists, including myself, during a session in the 3G World Congress in Bangkok earlier this month.

"We can save a lot with the economies of scale because we use the same component parts in our infrastructure offerings for either GSM or CDMA."

Normally, the 3G World Congress takes place in Hong Kong. Last year, I was lucky to be invited by Qualcomm to the event. This year, because of the SARS breakout, the event had been moved to Bangkok.

Do you remember Metcalfe's Law? Robert Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com, who also invented the Ethernet that allows computers to be interconnected in a network, said that the value -- or usefulness -- of a network would increase exponentially as the number of its nodes increased.

Keeping his law in mind, I have been questioning myself of the real value of the SMS or MMS services if the number of mobile phones I can send them to does not increase because of the interoperability problem.

What if, for example, I want to send a short video clip with voice annotation from my GSM cell phone to someone who has a CDMA cell phone? It that cannot work, the use of the cell phones will be limited although the number of cell phone users may double or triple.

Suppose we have new services in the future such as video- conferencing, can we participate in the session using a mix of WCDMA and CDMA 2000 1x EV-DO cell phones? Ideally, we should be able to. But, in reality, that may be a big challenge. Here is where Ericsson seems to also have the upper hand. With one foot in each standard, the company should be able to provide the ideal bridge. "If the operator uses our SMS or MMS gateways, there will no problem," said Peter.

Here Telkom is one of Ericsson's major customers. As we all know, Telkom is using Ericsson's CDMA 2000 1X infrastructure for its TelkomFlexi. With Ericsson hardware and software, there should be no problem sending an SMS or MMS from a TelkomFlexi handset to any GSM cell phone. At least, that is what we expect.

What is the road map of the mobile communication and mobile data? Right now, CDMA seems to have the head start. According to Peter Lancia, we are now looking at CDMA 2000 EV-DV for the ultimate in mobile data for a couple of years into the future.

He also predicted that it will arrive commercially in the 2005 timeframe, giving us integrated voice and data connection and real time data services. With the integrated voice and data communication, for example, two people can exchange video clips and talk to each other using one single channel.

Ericsson has demonstrated the CDMA 2000 EV-DV over its commercial CDMA 2000 1X network in its San Diego lab. During the recent 3G World Congress, it showcased a simulation of the infrastructure, as moving the entire lab to Bangkok for the event was simply out of the question. "Nonetheless, it shows that the CDMA 2000 EV-DV already works," said Peter.

The questions remain the same: What can we use these amazing capabilities for? How can we capitalize on them to create real benefits that will improve our quality of life? We only have two more years to think hard and invent. Invent, just like Lars and Hilda Ericsson invented their first car phone.