Brandishing Korea as a model, the CDMA Development Group looks at the future of its technology through rose-tinted lenses.
With the battle for market share boiling up over the next generation of technologies and the wideband CDMA protocol gearing up for dominance, last week the CDG presented a Webcast with Samsung Inc. to throw up Korea as the litmus test of all that is possible with cdma2000.
Samsung had congratulated itself recently as the pioneer of 3G with its successful launch of cdma2000 1x for Korea Telecom with all the bells and whistles tweaking the definition of 3G-which W-CDMA advocates believe is yet to arrive.
Hung Song, Samsung’s vice president, wireless system international business management group in South Korea, and John S. Csapo, vice president STA wireless system laboratory, applauded their technology as well as the steady progress of wireless services over the wireline forte.
Song, who claimed that CDMA has a 56-percent penetration rate in the country, demonstrated that SK Telecom remains the CDMA leader with 10.9 million of the 27 million subscribers in the country as of March. KT Freetel boasts 5.4 million subscribes; LG Telecom counts 3.8 million; STI has 3.4 million and KTM.Com has 3.1 million, according to Song.
Significantly, he noted that by the end of 2002, wireless subscribers will have cruised past wireline subscribers by about 3 million, wireless boasting 27 million and wireline 24 million.
Since the migration to the next phase of technologies is mainly about data, Song anticipates revenue growth in the wireless data market to leap from $1 million in 1999 to $250 million by 2005. Samsung’s expectation for 2001 is $71 million. Voice is expected to grow up to $462 million into 2005 from $270 million in 1999, he said.
Data services will operate in a multimedia environment with video on demand, audio on demand, real-time information service, business-to-business and Internet search engine, he remarked.
Samsung, he stressed, will comply with operators’ requirements, which include high-speed packet data service and mobile Internet protocol with forward link of 384 Kbps and reverse link of 153.6 Kbps, voice capacity increase by 1.5 to 1.7 times and handset standby time increase by 2 times and 1.5 times for color handsets.
Samsung says subscribers will pay 21 cents per packet for multimedia service and 54 cents per packet for text service. All the charges are per 512-byte packet.
Song demonstrated that in the early stage of the migration, operators will offer short message services, caller ID, voice added service, which will upgrade to VoIP, multimedia video conference and unified messaging. In customized service, it will move from personal information management, news on demand and community service to e-business card, identity card and multimedia chatting in the next stage. As for information and entertainment, weather information, town information, music and video download, karaoke and fortune-teller service will progress to multimedia news, remote education, video on demand and arcade games.
Location-based services will improve from traffic information service, detour information service, call taxi information service to national location information service, location-unified solution, and accurate location tracing in the next phase. Unified messaging, which entails wireless unified voice traffic information service, Intranet access, e-signature and data upload and download, will upgrade to monitoring, security service, remote process control, vending-machine control based unified solution. And m-commerce will progress from account balance check, deposit and withdraw to e-money, e-trade, and multimedia based-e-commerce.
Csapo said Samsung handsets support all the browser services, including WAP and imode. He refuted the recent report that China may be backtracking from cdma2000 technology. “China is an aggressive player,” chipped in Song,
A China newspaper had reported that the country may be exploring its TD-SCDMA technology over cdma2000.
