NEW YORK-For Coherent Communications Systems Inc. of Leesburg, Va., the new digital arrivals on the wireless communications scene represent a golden opportunity for its echo cancellation technologies.
Digital cellular communications pose more complex echo problems than their analog counterparts, and these distortions can interfere significantly with reception, especially during call hand-overs. Coherent’s hardware and software technologies, which it develops and manufactures, are designed to cancel out these reception problems.
“All the new wireless operators that got cities separated around the country still have to carry the traffic in between,” said Daniel L. McGinnis, Coherent’s chief executive officer.
“If you’re APC (American Personal Communications) or NextWave (Personal Communications Inc.), you don’t want MCI (Communications Corp.) or Sprint (Corp.) to carry your traffic in between. So we’re getting a good deal of that second-tier business.”
In fact, the biggest “growth driver” for Coherent’s business generally is the wireless industry. “Half of our sales are in wireless,” he said.
Calling Coherent’s sector of the industry, “a very incestuous business,” McGinnis noted that many of the company’s customers also are its competitors. The largest of these is Lucent Technologies Inc., which accounts for about 38 percent of the approximately $300 million market in digital signal processor-based echo cancelers.
