DENVER-A Cingular Wireless executive last week discussed the benefits of EDGE technology as an alternative to true third-generation networks, further evidence that EDGE may still play heavily in future plans for U.S. operators.
Anil Doradla, a wireless technology researcher for Cingular, made his comments during the Intelligent Networking for Wireless Architectures conference in Denver. Doradla expressed confidence in EDGE technology, which at one point fell on hard times but now seems to be making a comeback. Doradla said EDGE would make “a good 3G alternative.”
“We feel that (EDGE) is going to be an excellent choice for 3G services,” Doradla said. “There are very many operators supporting EDGE.”
Carriers in Latin America, the Middle East and Russia, and vendors such as Siemens AG, have voiced support for EDGE. And in the United States, AT&T Wireless Services Inc. and Cingular have perhaps been the technology’s most vocal proponents.
Doradla discussed possible migration paths for TDMA operators like AT&T and Cingular. He said moving to GSM would be a good move-AT&T already has announced plans to overlay its TDMA network with GSM/GPRS technology-and then a GPRS upgrade would likely follow. However, after that point many European carriers are expected to skip EDGE, which offers added data benefits to GPRS networks, and move directly to wideband-CDMA, which is considered a full 3G network technology.
Doradla said while W-CDMA might be a good technology, “for now it’s not even worth talking about.” Doradla pointed to W-CDMA problems in Japan and the Isle of Man as reasons to hold off on W-CDMA.
“Things aren’t working as smoothly as they would have hoped,” he said.
For this reason, he said, Cingular is looking very closely at EDGE.
Spectrum constraints and financial concerns will play the biggest roles in considering EDGE, Doradla said. Rolling out W-CDMA requires quite a bit of additional spectrum, and U.S. carriers might not have access to more spectrum anytime soon. The Department of Defense is using spectrum the wireless industry wants for 3G services, and there’s no indication that industry will win the battle. In addition, Doradla said moving to W-CDMA is like installing a totally new network-a costly move-whereas EDGE is merely considered an upgrade.
EDGE, or Enhanced Data Rate for Global Evolution, was introduced in 1997 as an enhancement to GPRS networks. Doradla explained that EDGE will be able to offer data speeds of up to 380 Kbps per second, compared with the 115 Kbps of GPRS networks. Third-generation networks are advertised as offering speeds of up to 2 Mbps per second.
However, Doradla said Cingular is not holding its breath for speeds in the Megabits-per-second range. He said wireless high-quality multimedia applications are mere fantasies.
“We really don’t believe this is going to be a potential application,” he said. “We do not believe we’ll be seeing Megabits per second.”
Instead, Doradla said, most future wireless applications will likely run in the tens-of-Kbps range, which provides more reason to move to EDGE instead of W-CDMA.
Doradla also briefly discussed GAIT, which stands for GSM ANSI Interoperability Team. GAIT is a new network standard that fuses TDMA and GSM technologies. The goal is to enhance roaming, preserve TDMA customers and serve as an interlude to more advanced networks. A variety of companies are interested in GAIT-including Nokia Corp., Alcatel, Panasonic Inc., Lucent Technologies Inc., Cingular, AT&T and VoiceStream Corp.-though none have yet officially signed on.
Doradla said Cingular faces a “certain challenge” in integrating its TDMA and GSM networks. GSM technology makes up about 28 percent of Cingular’s network.
“We’ve been working on that (GAIT) quite a bit,” Doradla said.
