As Europe’s incumbent 2G operators look to make the most of their investment in GPRS, Motorola’s decision to deliver infrastructure capable of supporting Coding Schemes 3 and 4 defined within the GPRS specifications, now looks like a prudent one and could provide the company with a significant market advantage.
The point of CS3 and 4 is that they deliver faster throughput, the value of which becomes greater as many commercial rollouts of UMTS are pushed further into the future or into smaller geographical areas. Combined with Motorola’s compression techniques, CS4 delivers throughput at up to 21kbit/s per timeslot including overheads and around 16kbit/s when the overheads have been taken into consideration. This compares to 8–9kbit/s for CS2 (minus overheads).
For many of the current GPRS terminals which offer four slot downstream transmission, CS4 equates to a realistic throughput of 64kbit/s (depending of course on cell capacity) which Laith Sadiq, director of marketing strategy for Motorola’s GTSS group suggested, “is a key speed. With this, GPRS can handle 90% of data requirements for the next few years.”
Sadiq refuted the suggestion that Motorola’s interest in CS3/4 was due to its relative failure to make an impact on the European UMTS market, “It is in Motorola’s interests that 3G is launched in Western Europe,” he said. Sadiq further explained, “Operators expect more from GSM/GPRS than they thought two or three years ago. This is providing a rational business case for CS3–4 and we can deliver it now.”
The software required to upgrade Motorola infrastructure for CS3/4 has been on the market for a year and so far has be delivered to six commercial networks in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, with a further eight or nine trialling the system. However, those operators with infrastructure from other providers face a more difficult task. “We expect most vendors to support this functionality but a separate hardware upgrade may be required,” said Sadiq.