Nortel's wireless broadband broadening coverage

Zatni Arbi, Contributor/Jakarta

A fellow IT journalist from Thailand commented that Nortel Networks had the best booth in the exhibition hall of the 3G World Congress and Exhibition 2004 in Hong Kong last month.

I concurred with her. There were more participants this year compared with two years before, but this vendor's well-designed booth stood out as the most user-friendly.

There were around seven display desks, each showing a different technology and attended to by people who knew what they were talking about.

That was in itself quite impressive, as this telco vendor is more than just knee-deep in each of the advanced wireless technologies today -- GSM, GPRS, EDGE, CDMA2000 1x, CDMA2000 1x EV-DO, UMTS, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, you name it.

Talking about size, Nortel is no small player. First, it has the U.S. as its installed base, with Verizon Wireless as its major customer. And then, with 20% market share in China Unicom's infrastructure, it is also a major player in China, where virtually all telco vendors have rushed in to grab a chunk of the 1.3 billion-people marketplace.

As we all have heard, the number of mobile users in China has just surpassed 320 million, which this still leaves a lot of room to grow.

Down under, Telstra is also using Nortel's products and services to upgrade its CDMA2000 1x networks, which were built in 2002, to its data-optimized CDMA2000 1x EV-DO 3G networks.

Once the upgrade is completed, city dwellers can enjoy 300 kbps to 600 kbps Internet access speed from their Telstra networks.

This company is also aggressively penetrating Europe with its CDMA 450 MHz technology. "Most of the CDMA 450 MHz networks are used to provide DSL services," said CDMA Networks president Richard Lowe.

The good thing about the European market is that the old Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) analog networks also used the 450 MHz frequency band, so no additional license was required when the network was upgraded to CDMA.

One of Nortel's most significant advances in Europe so far is Eurotel Praha's CDMA 450 MHz broadband network, which provides the Czechs with wireless broadband Internet access.

Interestingly, while countries such as India, Thailand, Pakistan and Vietnam were repeatedly mentioned as the Greenfield hotspots in Asia Pacific, Indonesia seems to be just a small speck on their radar screen. Fortunately, it is a growing speck. Esia, the CDMA-based fixed wireless operator, is one of their major customers here. Nortel has also completed a trial run with PT Wireless Indonesia in the effort to bring 3G CDMA2000-1x EV-DO wireless data service to the people of Jakarta.

Too bad, there is still no news yet as to how soon the service will become commercially available to us.

Broadband DSL

One of the technologies showcased at Nortel's booth was the Broadband DSL, which was in reality the CDMA2000-1x EV-DO over the 450 MHz network. The service can bring data and voice services to customer terminals at broadband speed (153 kbps and up).

Depending on whether the frequency band is licensed and how much the license fee costs, the Broadband DSL can be an alternative that is hard to beat.

CDMA services usually utilize the 800 MHz radio frequency band (as used by Esia), 1900 MHz (as used Telkom Flexi and StarOne in Jakarta, West Java and Banten provinces as well as PT WIN) and 2100 MHz.

The lower 450 MHz frequency band has the benefit of giving better propagation. This translates into the need for fewer cell sites and therefore fewer base transceiver stations, resulting in a lower investment requirement.

In terms of voice quality and data-carrying capacity, there is no difference, however. The great efficiency is one of the reasons Nortel is pushing the CDMA 450 MHz so strongly all over the world.

By the way, in the CDMA infrastructure market, Nortel is just behind market leader Lucent Technologies. Its competitors include companies such as Motorola, Samsung, Alcatel and Ericsson.

Wireless mesh network The broad range of the skills that Nortel Networks has under its roof is also being demonstrated in Taipei, Taiwan.

Taipei's Mobile City (M City) Project has chosen Nortel's Wireless Mesh Network to provide city-wide broadband coverage.

Taipei has a population of 2.6 million people and covers an area of around 272 sq km. The operator, Qware, is expecting that around 10,000 access points will be available in buildings, MRT stations and other locations in the city by the end of next year.

Nortel's Wireless Mesh Network is similar to the traditional cellular telephone architecture, where each cell is served by a base transceiver station (BTS).

However, while the BTSs in the traditional cellular architecture are linked to the central hub with cables, in a mesh network one BTS may be linked wirelessly to the BTS in the adjacent cells.

Therefore, there is no need to hard-wire cell interconnection. The result is a more scalable network that is much cheaper to expand. Gone is the issue of right of way and the need to dig up roads and pavements to bury the cables.

Nortel's Wireless Mesh Network is basically a modified Wireless LAN (WLAN). Any 802.11 wireless-capable notebook or PDA will be able to access the Internet via this network, even when the user hops from one cell to another. Thus, a major benefit to the users is that they can roam much more easily. Conventional hotspots based on Wi-Fi technology will not offer such a level of mobility and convenience.

Exciting times

Once again, it is clearly an exciting time for those of us who have been wishing for better data access wherever we go. The technology options are plenty and the vendors are competing fiercely against each other for market share.

What is needed now is a more conducive and more transparent regulatory environment. The telco vendors say: "We just want a level playing field," while we, the users, say, "What we want is ubiquitous, affordable services."