CDMA gets its day in the sun AirTouch turns up service in L.A. market

AirTouch Communications took advantage of the international spotlight on code division multiple access technology last week to announce that its Los Angeles cellular network was ready to support selected high-volume CDMA customers.

The long-awaited announcement from AirTouch, which has weathered attacks in the past for pinpointing CDMA launch targets it did not hit, came in the midst of the CDMA Development Group's first annual CDMA World Congress, held last week in Singapore. There, both vendor and network operator proponents of CDMA-and many of its naysayers-gathered to evaluate the technology's global progress (see related story on this page).

In line with the plans of the PrimeCo Personal Communications joint venture in which it is a partner, AirTouch will offer CDMA service under the Powerband name. No marketing effort will be undertaken initially; instead, the operator will hand-pick several hundred existing customers based on their usage patterns and offer them CDMA upgrades.

"It's quite different from a retail launch," said Craig Farrill, vice president and chief technical officer of AirTouch Cellular. "This is much more of a digital transition."

AirTouch has upgraded its network using Motorola CDMA infrastructure equipment employing 8 kb/s vocoder rates, which Farrill said provides voice quality comparable with or better than analog. In its initial stages, the CDMA service area runs from the San Fernando Valley to Ventura, covering about a third of the Los Angeles market. The company hopes to ramp up that coverage to about 80% by the year's end and to cover the entire region by early next year.

The carrier's goal is to move 15% of its analog customers to CDMA by the end of the first quarter of 1997, Farrill said.

The launch marks AirTouch's third whack at rolling out a digital network, having launched a GSM network in Germany and a PDC network in Japan. Still, the carrier expects the L.A. project to provide needed digital education.

"We've already learned a lot about what not to do, but we do plan to go to school," said Farrill. In contrast to other recent announcements of commercial CDMA availability, including Bell Atlantic Nynex Mobile's recent limited rollout in Trenton, N.J., the AirTouch move is being characterized as a major turning point for the embattled digital wireless technology. The mobility requirements, large customer base and RF environment of the L.A. market promise to make it a difficult proving ground for CDMA.

"Many people see it as a bellwether, saying that if AirTouch can do it in its biggest market, it can be done anywhere," said Woody Ritchey, vice president of sales for the Pan American wireless infrastructure division of Motorola's Cellular Infrastructure Group.

Indeed, one analyst views the deployment as a leap ahead for CDMA. "It's almost like we've been undergraduates, and now we're going to fine-tune our learning and become masters of our craft," said John Ledahl, director and principal analyst for wireless programs at Dataquest.