OXFORD, England-The European Commission has threatened five European countries with legal action over their failure to award DCS 1800 licenses. Belgium, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands and Spain all missed the commission’s 1 January 1998 deadline for issuing at least one DCS 1800 digital cellular license. Legal proceedings will begin unless licenses are issued within a “reasonable period.”
The Netherlands looks certain to escape retribution, having awarded two licenses at the end of February. Belgium and Ireland issued tenders in December and currently are evaluating bids. Italy has at last released its tender, and Spain is expected to follow within weeks. License awards are anticipated within the next three months.
Compared with their previous track records of desultory implementation of new telecommunications regulation, all these countries now are moving at the speed of light.
All in all it’s a pretty good result for the European Commission. But whether the end result will satisfy the commission’s original objectives remains to be seen.
DCS 1800 started life as PCN, a rather grandiose vision of personal communications networks offering anywhere, anytime connectivity rather similar to the PCS (personal communications services) concept in the United States. But it soon metamorphosed into Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) at a different frequency.
DCS 1800 should really be termed GSM 1800. In fact, that’s been realized elsewhere in the world. In Asia, where 1800 MHz spectrum also has been awarded to wireless operators, Singapore Telecom last year officially changed its DCS 1800 service name to GSM 1800, believing there is more brand identity associated with the name “GSM.”
DCS 1800 is effectively an extra spectrum allocation for GSM, with the higher frequencies allowing higher capacity at the expense of shorter range.
Additional spectrum provides room for additional operators. And additional operators increase competition, which is basically the European Commission’s motivation for requiring each Member State to license at least one DCS 1800 operator.
Regulators and telecom operators have shown relatively little interest in pure DCS 1800 networks in Europe. Only four national networks so far have been launched, confined to the largest markets of France, Germany and the United Kingdom. But there is growing interest in dual-band networks combining GSM 900 and DCS 1800.
“Perceptions of 1800 MHz cellular technology have changed since its introduction,” said Ted Hally, vice president and general manager, GSM Products Division, in Motorola Inc.s Cellular Infrastructure Group. “Three to four years ago, DCS 1800 was seen almost as a rival to GSM 900. Today, both 900 and 1800 operators are beginning to see the benefits of using both frequency bands on a single network.”
Hally noted that one benefit of DCS 1800 is the capacity it provides in densely populated urban areas. “But by combining it with GSM 900, the best features of both can be leveraged. In particular, dual band offers far superior in-building coverage and overall capacity than GSM 900, while retaining the latter’s geographical reach.”
Standards for dual-band networks and terminals developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) were motivated by GSM 900 operators’ desire to increase their network capacities using 1800 MHz spectrum. But the first dual-band terminals, introduced over the past year, have satisfied other needs.
“The initial market application for the early dual-band terminals has been the enabling of international roaming from the DCS 1800 operators to the more numerous GSM 900 networks,” said Robin Potter, vice president-consultancy of Mobile Systems International.
The potential for enhanced capacity and coverage with dual-band networks will, of course, remain unrealized until dual-band terminals are in common use.
“It’s unlikely that significant network capacity can be delivered through dual band until dual-band terminals achieve around 30-percent market penetration,” noted Potter. “This will take at least two to three years. But within a five-year time frame it is not unrealistic to anticipate more than 50 percent of traffic being supported by the 1800 MHz environment.”
Such considerations mean the superficially attractive concept of using DCS 1800 to in-fill hot spots may take some time to materialize.
Campus-style applications for closed user groups, where the customer proposition is linked to the sale of dual-band terminals, are more likely to appear first because they enable efficient use of the 1800 MHz infrastructure. These applications essentially combine a local cordless environment with wide-area cellular.
Operators and vendors are focusing on this market opportunity, both for pure GSM 900 as well as dual-band networks. At the GSM World Congress in February in Cannes, France, Ericsson launched its GSM Cordless Telephony System (CTS), which uses the Home Base concept to combine cordless and cellular applications. CTS routes calls over the public switched telephone network (PSTN) if the subscriber is in the cordless coverage area and over the GSM network otherwise. It sounds like the death knell for Ericsson’s digital enhanced cordless technology (DECT) offerings in the public-network arena.
The ultimate campus-style product is probably U.S.-based interWAVE Communications International Ltd.’s “GSM Network in a Box,” also announced in Cannes, which combines local switching with the base station controller. It allows campus networks to be set up in minutes with on-site switching to contain traffic locally rather than backhauling it to the mobile switching center (MSC). This is a client-server approach, rather than the mainframe style architectures of the conventional vendors.
Innovative campus-style applications should drive the development of dual-band networks. Whether they will in fact do so is not yet clear. Such applications are inherently localized solutions, whereas the emphasis of the new dual-band licenses is still on national coverage. The flexibility of today’s network solutions is not yet matched by flexibility in the regulatory environment.
