CDMA breaks out of the gate

For better or worse, the visibility of code division multiple access reached a pinnacle at the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association's Wireless '96 show in Dallas last week. Plans for the technology's commercial debut were unveiled, and carriers and vendors on both sides of the debate attempted to forecast its future.

Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile announced it will offer commercial 13 kb/s CDMA service to selected customers in Trenton, N.J., and Bucks County, Pa., beginning this month.

"We have made it clear that CDMA is ready to go and that the infrastructure provider we decided to use has a commercially ready product," said Richard Lynch, executive vice president and chief technology officer at BANM. "Once the customers taste it, they're going to like it."

The limited deployment of an undisclosed number of cell sites will be augmented by June, Lynch said. The goal is to gauge customer reception of the features allowed by CDMA-such as caller ID, short message service, message waiting indicator, privacy and authentication-and develop further rollout plans based on that response, Lynch said.

"I don't want to be pushing voice privacy if the customer's concern is messaging," he said. However, short message service will not be available at launch time because the company has not yet selected a messaging center.

BANM has been testing a 13 kb/s vocoder from Lucent Technologies, which the companies found to provide a higher quality service than the alternative.

"We could have been commercial already if we had gone down the path with the 8 kb/s vocoder," said Scott Erickson, vice president of marketing for wireless systems at Lucent. "But as we started to get into trials, it was clear that voice quality, while OK, was not very robust."

CDMA detractors at last week's show were clearly not impressed with BANM's limited plans, but one industry analyst said if the carrier can address the loading issues, the naysayers will be quieted. "I was surprised [BANM] did it so quickly, but it's a smart move strategically if they're ready to step up to a solid commercial deployment," said John Ledahl, director of wireless programs at Dataquest. "As soon as that occurs, the questions about CDMA go away."

Even if those issues aren't resolved, CDMA could still have a place in the industry. "CDMA may very well not work under maximum loading conditions, but so what?" said Ira Brodsky, president of Datacomm Research. "There still could be a huge market for this technology, even if it has to be carefully deployed so that it rarely exceeds 50% loading."

That jibes with the plans of AirTouch, which announced last week that it will first market CDMA service to its high-use customers as a premium service, possibly under a separate brand name. But the company has no doubts about CDMA's future.

"CDMA is going to work and it's going to work big time," said Sam Ginn, chairman and chief executive officer of AirTouch.

The results of a recent Dataquest survey predict that CDMA will have a prominent role in personal communication services plans (see figure). American Personal Communications, which announced last week that it has reached the 60,000 customer mark on its commercial PCS system in the Washington, D.C./Baltimore market, still plans to deploy a parallel CDMA network, which the company said is in the engineering stages.

"We will add a CDMA network in the Washington/Baltimore market, but at this point we have no plans to discontinue our GSM service," said Scott Schelle, CEO of APC.

Ultimately, the ideal market for CDMA could prove to be in fixed-use applications where mobility issues for CDMA are moot, Brodsky said. "You may find that the CDMA guys may go after fixed users, where the challenges of CDMA are greatly attenuated," he said. Other vendors were touting their CDMA accomplishments at Wireless '96. Northern Telecom has demonstrated its own 13 kb/s vocoder on BC Tel Mobility's network in Vancouver, British Columbia. Motorola's Cellular Infrastructure Group introduced a convection-cooled CDMA base station in a scaled-down package, and Qualcomm announced it had licensed its CDMA technology to Sanders to make remote antenna drivers and remote antenna signal processors.