Some Personal Communications Services contenders are looking to differentiate themselves in the new age of wireless competition with data services based on the established Global System for Mobile communications standard.
“We see this as a strong differentiator for us and plan to offer it very early,” said Glenn Gottlieb, product director at Pacific Bell Mobile Services.
“In talking to corporate customers-many of whom have been burned before by mobile data-we find they’re looking forward to what they see as a ripe opportunity for data solutions using GSM,” he said. “They like that GSM is ISDN-based, so no modem pool is needed to connect to the corporate network.”
But one thing that corporate buyers are demanding is an extensive coverage footprint so their applications can roam. Since GSM is not a digital standard for existing cellular networks, buildout of new PCS networks is required to provide that coverage.
By the end of next year, the GSM North American footprint is projected to cover about 220 million people based on commitments made to the technology by PCS carriers.
“We’re looking to have roaming agreements with all of those carriers for both voice and data services,” Gottlieb said.
GSM-based data services already have taken off in Europe where Nokia Mobile Phones recently introduced its Nokia 9000 Communicator, a “smart” phone that includes fax, e-mail, short messaging and data transmission as well as voice telephony. Its data transmission capability may prove popular despite GSM’s modest 9.6 kilobits per second transmission speed.
“For most applications [9.6 kbps] is very good,” Gottlieb said. Using data compression schemes and error correction protocols, GSM transmission speeds can be goosed “upwards around 28.8 kbps,” he added.
GSM technology increases system capacity by dividing a frequency channel into a cycle of repeating timeslots. Faster data transmission speeds are possible by aggregating more than one of those timeslots, boosting transmissions speeds as fast as 64 kbps, fast enough for videoconferencing.
This High Speed Circuit Switched standard is in the definition stage but should be available in 1998, said Ragnar Larsson, product manager at Ericsson Radio Systems AB.
The allocation of timeslots in a channel may be varied so bandwidth-on-demand service is possible, although who controls that allocation is in discussion, he said.
A General Packet Radio Services standard for GSM also is in definition and Ericsson recently announced a partnership with Cisco Systems Inc., a leading supplier of internetworking solutions for the Internet’s World Wide Web and corporate intranets.
But GSM carriers, like all wireless data boosters, may have to go further to optimize Internet/intranet data for their networks.
“The Web has to be adjusted,” said Andrew Harsch, wireless data market manager for Nokia Mobile Phones. “We need some kind of filter to suppress the graphics and get at the meat.”
With 20 million subscribers on networks in 98 countries, the potential for GSM-based mobile data is enormous.
