W-cdma + Hsdpa At 900mhz!

[Effendi]

3G Test Calls Made at 900Mhz Band

Nortel, Qualcomm and Orange have successfully completed UMTS and HSDPA calls in the 900 MHz band. W-CDMA in the 900 MHz band is a cost effective way to deliver nationwide high-speed wireless coverage. It achieves a 60 percent reduction in cell sites required to serve rural areas and delivers improved Quality of Service in urban areas by enhancing in-building penetration by 25 percent. The category 6 HSDPA calls, using the 16 QAM Modulation and reaching 3.6Mbps data rate, were completed using Nortel's commercial infrastructure technologies, mobile handsets based on Qualcomm's Mobile Station Modem MSM6280 chipset solution and Orange's 900 MHz spectrum.

"UMTS in the 900 MHz band is a complementary solution to existing 3G services that will enable Orange to provide high speed wireless Internet to both rural and urban areas of France, thereby enabling us to deliver a true nationwide UMTS/HSDPA service," said Vivek Badrinath, executive vice president, products, technology and innovation, Orange Group.

Nortel's innovations in spectral efficiency are the key enablers to liberate spectrum in the 900 MHz band, providing wireless operators with the capability to deploy W-CDMA in that band. The implementation of UMTS 900 is compatible with widely deployed Node B hardware for simplified integration. Qualcomm's Mobile Station Modem solutions for HSDPA were the first in the world to be commercially available, and data rates of up to 7.2 Mbps are supported by the company's HSDPA portfolio.

[Triband81]

That's quite interesting since this is a similar step which will be applied to the US/Canada when UMTS/HSDPA 1900 is fully deployed. UMTS/HSDPA will also be available in the 850 Mhz band.

[AdmiralAK]

Soon QuadBand UMTS phones ?

850/900/1900/2100
add ontop of that GSM 900/850/1900/1800 -- OoooOoooOooOOooooo

[DRNewcomb]

But it's rather stupid. With a 900 MHz or 850 MHz license you get about 25 MHz of specturm. It takes about 30 MHz to make a proper deployment of WCDMA. That's three channels at 5 MHz x 2 per channel. If you try to deploy on just one channel (which can be done) there is a serious degredation of speed as you move away from the cell site.

WCDMA is only important to me as a way to GSM roam in Japan, and now S. Korea. I'm much more a fan of TD-CDMA, which is much more spectrum efficient and can be deployed with as little as 5 MHz, total.

[Andytel]

Originally Posted by DRNewcomb

If you try to deploy on just one channel (which can be done) there is a serious degredation of speed as you move away from the cell site.

I share your concern.
Also, deployment in the lower frequency band with 60% reduction of cell sites will obviously impact network capacity (let's say of the same percentage, without considering channel reduction)
If you have to cover vast areas where the network load will be negligible, it may not even worth the effort, while in urban areas you may use this spectrum as an overlay which provides only a limited increase in network capacity.
I think the economic benefits are to be evaluated carefully, they're not so evident.