NEW YORK-A key component of the IMT-2000 global wireless third-generation standard that the International Telecommunication Union evaluated this month comes from the kind of small, entrepreneurial company whose voice is often drowned out in this type of process.
Golden Bridge Technology, West Long Branch, N.J., has five patents pending for its Common Packet Channel technology. CPCH allows many users to share one channel and facilitates data performance and throughput by enabling very rapid packet acquisition and release.
“The very recent approval of CPCH for inclusion into release 1999 of the 3G standard will lead to significantly improved high-speed wireless data transmission and Internet access up to 2 [Megabits per second],” said Elmer Yuen, president and chief executive officer of Golden Bridge.
IMT-2000, a set of specifications that include wideband CDMA (based on Global System for Mobile communications) and cdma2000 technology “was put forth with the objective of accommodating packet data at high rates,” said Kourosh Parsa, GBT vice president for systems engineering.
Common Packet Channel allows typical data throughput at up to 385 kilobits per second, but also permits throughput of as much as 2 Mbps if the cell is used only for data, he said. This is a quantum leap from General Packet Radio Services, an emerging technology for which first-release terminals will enable speeds up to 56 kbps and, in future handset generations, maximum anticipated rates of 115 kbps.
“The deployment of the Common Packet Channel at the 3G W-CDMA common air interface leads to a five-to-tenfold increase in data capacity and therefore an [equal] reduction in packet data modem cost at the base node,” Parsa said.
“Until we entered the scene, the talk was of dedicated channels in which you dial into the service provider and that line is always yours, which is very limited.”
Within the Telecommunications Industry Association TR46.1 committee, Golden Bridge led the technical specification of a packet-oriented 3G system for the United States, a process that began late in 1997. By June 1998, the resulting Wireless Multimedia and Messaging System known as WIMS W-CDMA was offered to the ITU as an IMT-2000 proposal.
Karin Zickermann, manager for marketing and standards at Golden Bridge, said GBT encouraged the convergence of WIMS with a proposal known as WCDMA/NA developed by T1, a committee accredited by the American National Standards Institute and supported by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions.
By January, AT&T Labs, Ericsson Inc., Golden Bridge and several other participants in the standardization process developed the new consensus proposal known as Wideband Packet-CDMA.
“W-CDMA could have been many things, but the reason it was a U.S. proposal is that, at the end of the day, friends and foes alike agreed it was a high-performance technology that withstood the scrutiny,” Parsa said.
W-CDMA is an evolution from GSM networks. For those cellular networks based on Interim Standard-41, carriers that deploy EDGE as a 2.5-generation transition “can probably graft GSM aspects onto the network backbone,” Parsa said.
“The [Interim Standard] 136 people (using Time Division Multiple Access technology), can take in W-CDMA after they take in EDGE.”
GBT, which has worked with AT&T Labs in New Jersey for several years on various projects related to packet data, has signed licensing agreements with AT&T and several other companies so far to provide access to its CPCH patents and technical knowledge.
Plans call for ITU to complete the standard in December and the entire specification should be released in March, Zickermann said.
The ITU task group was meeting from Oct. 25 through Nov. 5 in Helsinki. “The purpose of the meeting is to complete Release 99 of the IMT-2000 radio interface specifications so that products can be available in time for the initial launch of IMT-2000 services in 2001,” according to the ITU.
