NEW YORK-Celcore Inc. expects to begin shipping its new GlobalSwitch in April, which the Memphis, Tenn., computer hardware and software designer believes is the first Global System for Mobile communications switch on the market that costs less than $1 million.
Late last year, Justin Dudley, vice president of radio frequency engineering for Telecel International Ltd., said Celcore’s pending introduction “will revolutionize small systems.” Telecel is a cellular carrier, headquartered in Chantilly, Va., that specializes in systems installation and operation in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Big GSM switches costing $3 million to $5 million, manufactured by large companies use mainframe computers as their backbone, said Bob Goodman, chief executive officer of Celcore. “That’s wonderful when you need a lot of processing power, but not when you want to deploy in rural areas with 5,000 to 10,000 customers,” Goodman said.
GSM switches, based on standards designed to unify digital wireless telecommunications networks in Europe, have focused on the large capacity needed for dense population centers that are close to each other.
GSM is the government-mandated digital standard in at least 100 countries worldwide, many of them developing nations.
That provides an opportunity for GSM deployment, but it also creates a problem for profitability. In developing nations, many areas have low cellular telephone traffic densities. At the same time, “the availability of backhaul is scarce or, if available, it’s very expensive,” Goodman said.
Taking a $10 million gamble on GSM, the privately held Celcore began working two-and-a-half years ago on a lower-priced switch, assigning nearly 100 engineers to the project. “The GSM low-density market is $2 to $3 billion a year,” Goodman said.
Celcore’s GSM system is built around the GlobalSwitch, the smallest of which is the size of a watermelon, Goodman said. Everything except the base station, which Celcore buys from third-party manufacturers, fits into a 19-inch cabinet. Petite size makes the system easy to transport, install and maintain. “Almost anyone can manage this; you don’t need a PhD in a white coat,” he added.
The GlobalSwitch integrates into a single hardware platform the functions of the mobile switching and authentication centers, home location and visitor location registers and base station controller. Doing so eliminates the need for separate subsystem components while also allowing the switching function to be deployed closer to the subscriber.
The new switch derives its small size and multi-faceted functionality from advanced object-oriented software and distributed processing technology. The system runs on a Windows NT server using Java programming language.
“The processors used to control it are Intel-based Pentium processors; we can use all the software tools for the computer industry, not the legacy software and hardware specialized for the telco industry,” Goodman said. “I believe this is the first time any telephone switch of any complexity has been designed with object-oriented codes. When a computer generates the code, there are fewer flaws than if the codes are done by hand.”
Each GlobalSwitch is designed to serve from a few hundred to 10,000 subscribers in its basic configuration, or up to 15,000 in an expanded configuration. The distributed architecture enables modular network growth by adding more GlobalCell base transceiver stations or GlobalSwitches as subscriber demand increases. GlobalSwitches also can be interconnected by satellite in remote areas without existing infrastructure.
“We made a bet on GSM,” Goodman said. “A lot of people, the big vendors, didn’t think we could do it.”
What’s next for Celcore? At the end of this year, it plans to roll out in the United States a small 1.9 GHz switch for personal communications services.
