@ Global CDMA Forum: Huawei gathers partners to push technology limits

SHANGHAI, China — With more than 340 people in attendance, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. gathered a diverse group of partners from around the world here to showcase its work on CDMA and let various operators talk about their experience with the technology.
Wan Biao, VP at Huawei and president of wireless networks, kicked off the event by highlighting the company’s work in CDMA dating back to 1995. Huawei has cooperated with top-tier CDMA developers around the world to become a “leading CMDA vendor,” he said.
Biao touted CDMA “as a great technology for providing mobile broadband services,” a theme often repeated throughout the one-day event. But he also pointed to Huawei as a technology-agnostic vendor that regularly advises carriers on which network upgrade paths to take.
Very often the evolution path depends on the ecosystem, particularly the penetration (or lack thereof) of DSL and other fixed-broadband solutions in each market, he said. “I do not think there is only one choice for the operator.”
Lowering the cost per bit to deliver data to customers is one of Huawei’s overarching goals, he added.
James Person, CEO of the CDMA Development Group, gave a keynote wherein he framed the state of CDMA today.
More than 330 operators have deployed CDMA networks in 120 countries and territories, he said. There are more than 522 million wireless subscribers on CDMA networks worldwide and that number is projected to reach upwards of 829 million by 2015.
It’s increasingly clear that China will help drive the future of CDMA, Person said. “China Telecom will be the largest CDMA operator in the world.” The carrier is on target to reach 100 million subscribers by year’s end.
More growth will come from EV-DO and other CDMA upgrade paths. EV-DO technology has been deployed by 168 operators to date and at least 142 million people are subscribing to services offered under that technology, he continued.
“Either this year or next year we will finally see the peak of 2G subscribers,” he said, looking back over a 20-year lifetime so far. “We’re just 10 years into that growth of 3G we expect that growth to continue for at least another 10 years.”
Indeed, CDMA has a long life ahead based on the upgrade paths available to operators, particularly considering the stage at which CDMA deployments are at on a mass scale today.
The CDMA2000 roadmap takes its first upgrade to CDMA2000 1x, which included enhancements such as a new vocoder and interference cancellation. From there, the fun really begins on the mobile data front, beginning with 1x EV-DO Rev. 0, then 1x EV-DO Rev. A, then 1x EV-DO Rev. B and finally 1x EV-DO Advanced.
Huawei’s hand in CDMA
In Q1 of this year, 32.8% of all CDMA infrastructure equipment was shipped by Huawei, according to the company. It wants to grow its share of the market to 40% very soon and become the second-largest CDMA vendor in the market.
The company’s latest network convergence solution is SingleRAN@Broad. According to Huawei’s description, operators can use SingleRAN@Broad to facilitate more precise network coverage by constructing multi-layer networks for a variety of environments and improve mobile network bandwidth and the consistency of broadband services through improved spectrum efficiency.
Almost half of Huawei’s 96,000 employees are engaged in research and development activities. This latest offering is a direct result of that investment, the company said.
Reducing the cost of a network isn’t only about the cost of equipment, said Tang XinHong, president of the CDMA and WiMAX product line at Huawei. Cost is very much about the entire portfolio with an end-to-end solution like SingleRAN, which is now used by more than 400 operators in 34 countries, he said.
Huawei wants carriers to operate and manage “golden pipes,” XinHong continued.
Later in the day, he and other Huawei executives detailed the company’s vision further in an interview with RCR Wireless News.
XinHong said he’s already looking ahead to a time where more than 50 billion devices will be connected to wireless networks. Surely, most of those connections will be machine-to-machine, but regardless carriers will have to define new business models and optimize networks at every step to meet this rising demand, he said.
Even today on average, 20% of all subscribers are using up 80% of the network. Meanwhile, when you look at revenue, it’s flipped. Around 80% of an operator’s customer base will generate the majority of revenue, XinHong said.
Huawei thinks that it can help protect and embolden carriers’ investments in EV-DO, despite the hesitation it sees for future investment in some markets, he said.
But without a doubt, the future of wireless will be multi tech, XinHong continued. SingleRAN@Broad allows carriers to use one piece of equipment for LTE and CDMA side-by-side, for example, he said.
Huawei wants to help operators become or remain profitable while increasing the capacity of their networks, he added. With its full suite of technology and equipment solutions, Huawei can reduce the cost per gigabit of data to less than 3% of what it is today, he claimed.
If that figure alone isn’t enough to make eyes light up, there’s no denying that many carriers are heading toward a severe capacity problem by 2015, as XinHong told RCR Wireless News.
“We understand the challenge of different operators,” he concluded.