Holding their own

Not to be outshined by the likes of Ericsson, Nokia, Motorola and other wireless heavyweights, niche infrastructure providers, microwave radio players and applications developers had plenty of opportunity to weigh in last month in Las Vegas.

Though Wireless 2001 was light on new product announcements and customer wins — perhaps a reflection of the soft economy — vendors had plenty to say about their role in extending network coverage, developing sticky applications and nudging the industry toward 3G.

The capacity extenders

Enabling carriers to add cell site capacity without breaking the bank was a prominent theme of Wireless 2001. Metawave used its recently announced partnership with Samsung — under which it which will co-develop a commercial base station — as a springboard to discuss its smart antenna technology.

“It makes sense to integrate antenna and base station solutions,” said Marty Feuerstein, senior vice president and general manager of embedded and data products. “Spectrum is such a scarce thing that carriers are looking for other ways to add capacity.”

“We believe we're well-positioned to solve service provider problems,” added Lowell Anderson, vice president of the SpotLight CDMA product line. Well-positioned in the sense that Metawave's smart antenna technology is embedded right in the base station. “The idea of adding cell sites is getting expensive,” he said. “You're not getting the capacity increase that you used to.”

Meanwhile, AirNet Communications announced a software upgrade for its AdaptaCell base station. The upgrade enables wireless operators to add enhanced data for GSM evolution (EDGE) functionality to their networks.

“Because our base station is software-defined, it's the only viable way to use an adaptive array solution,” said AirNet CEO Lee Hamilton.

AirNet officials hope that one of the sticking points for software-defined base stations is their low cost. In contrast, larger infrastructure providers require customers to purchase new base stations every time they want to evolve to higher-speed platforms. A solution like AdaptaCell “would cannibalize their own business,” Hamilton said.

AirNet also unveiled a next gen version of its AirSite base station, which accommodates GPRS data rates. AirSite eliminates the need to string T-1 lines to each cell site, Hamilton said.

Adding new base stations isn't the only way to add capacity to the network, however. Repeater Technologies reminded carriers that alternatives exist in the form of, well, repeaters. “If you have a carrier that conducts a utilization report, they'll find out that 30% to 50% of their cell sites are underutilized,” said Rich Conlon, vice president of North American sales for Repeater.

In many instances, carriers would save on infrastructure costs by re-allocating the capacity they already have rather than installing new base stations to fill coverage holes, Conlon said. “There's still an underlying problem in that carriers… are not thinking economically.”

Conlon cited Repeater's recently announced deal with Alamosa PCS, the largest Sprint PCS affiliate, to prove his point. Alamosa uses the supplier's RepeaterHybrid Network equipment to reallocate capacity where it's needed in the network.

If show-goers noticed improved cellular coverage in The Venetian Resort, Hotel and Casino, which hosted the Wireless 2001 show, they had LGC Wireless to thank. LGC finished installing its LGCell and MetroReach Focus in-building wireless system in the 1 million square foot facility just as the show got underway.

The Venetian posed a special challenge because the system had to be configured to support multiple carriers. The system supports iDEN, GSM, CDMA and TDMA technologies in the 800 to 1900 MHz frequencies, according to Enrique Cuellar, vice president of marketing for LGC Wireless.

LGC's in-building wireless product line features a centralized radio architecture with distributed antennas, which Cuellar says is more flexible than distributed radio architectures. “We aren't the cheapest but we're the best,” he added.

The radio stars

Though no major announcements came out of the microwave radio sector, several prominent players used Wireless 2001 to establish their market foothold.

NEC America showed off the previously announced 3000 Series Sonet digital microwave radio, which was part of a live demo at this year's event.

The system carries one OC-3 link per RF channel and can be used as a wireless broadband backhaul solution, said Becky Holland, sales manager for NEC America's microwave radio division. “Even if leased fiber is available, this is something that is much more flexible,” she said.

NEC America competitor Harris used the show to emphasize its point-to-point and point-to-multipoint microwave high-speed access solutions.

Microwave appeals to operators that want to extend the reach of their networks quickly and cost-effectively, said Carleton Smith, vice president of sales and marketing for Harris' Microwave Communications Division. “People will put in microwave before they put in fiber,” he said.

The company's re-branded ClearBurst MB point-to-multipoint platform supports time division multiplexing, IP and Ethernet interfaces.

Meanwhile, Intersil emphasized that when it comes to wireless equipment, it's what is inside that counts. Juan Garcia, manager of marketing engineering for Intersil's CommLink products, emphasized “the ability of our chipsets to support any and all protocols.”

At the show, Intersil introduced the four-channel ISL5416 programmable down-converter, which enables carriers to support multiple protocols on the same chip at the same time; and the ISL5217 programmable up-converter, which can support up to four channels.

The data innovators

ArrayComm's booth attracted a fair amount of traffic with a live demo of its i-Burst high-speed data architecture. Though it's not yet commercially available, i-Burst has garnered considerable attention in the industry because of its potential to deliver 1 Mb/s speeds for a number of mobile applications. Arnaud Saffari, co-founder of ArrayComm, called it “pervasive access.”

“The issue is you want to have access to the Internet in unlimited quantities,” Saffari said. “You want to be able to carry it without going through the hoops of stripping it down.”

i-Burst plans to work with chipset manufacturers and OEMs to incorporate the technology into hand-held devices and base stations.

According to Saffari, the key to i-Burst is that it isn't designed as both a voice and data platform.

There is a catch: If users travel any faster than 18 mph while using i-Burst, the signal will drop.

ArrayComm further strengthened its i-Burst initiative late last month by securing unpaired spectrum in the 1.9 GHz band in Australia's recent 3G spectrum auctions through subsidiary CKW Wireless.

“We're using Australia for a case in point for an official standard within the UMTS frequency band,” said Nitin Shah, executive vice president of ArrayComm. “If we can make a commercial success with i-Burst, anyone who has time division duplexed spectrum throughout the world now has the ability to provide portable broadband access to users at the other end of that spectrum.”

The application developers

Glenayre Technologies spent Wireless 2001 highlighting its new @ctiveVision unified messaging platform as well as its large-scale @ctiveMessaging platform. Operators can use Glenayre's @ctiveMessaging platform to provide unified messaging services to their customers. The platform scales up to 6000 ports and supports up to 5 million subscribers. “It's kind of the brains, if you will, and extremely large-scale, which is what carriers want,” said Jim Kelly, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Glenayre.

@ctiveVision enables users to manage voice mail, e-mail and faxes through one mailbox, which can be accessed via a WAP-enabled handset or a Web interface. “It all uses an address book that's common throughout @ctiveVision,” said George Backhaus, senior product manager of technology planning for Glenayre.

@ctiveVision relies on an open architecture so that carriers can customize the platform — for example, convert the system to a local language.

Comverse touted its speech portal at the show and announced it would incorporate voice extensible markup language (XML) into its speech-enabled products.

With the industry's 3G timeframe remaining a big question mark, Comverse also emphasized that its solutions are designed to work with 2.5G and 3G networks and all points in between. “Our portfolio isn't dependent on [3G] for success,” said Edward Gregory, Comverse's vice president of sales and marketing for the Americas. “Our view is, when our customers are ready to go to 3G, we'll be ready there with them.”

Comverse's Tel@GO voice platform, which the vendor featured in a live demo, enables users to browse through their voice mail and e-mail with a speech recognition platform. Features include voice-activated dialing, voice browsing and voice-activated personal and system address books.

Sun Microsystems focused on Java-based wireless application platforms at Wireless 2001, specifically one that would knit together XML and IP. There has recently been a convergence of standards bodies in the Java space, said Ann Wettersten, vice president of Sun Microsystems's wireless business group. And Sun, a relative newcomer to the wireless scene, hopes to ensconce itself in that space.

“We have a relentless emphasis on an open platform” that industry leaders can design against, said Barbara Kay, director of marketing for the wireless business unit of Sun's network service provider group. “It's great that other people are embracing standardization.”

One way Sun can quickly become a strong wireless player is by forging partnerships. Sun and Lucent Technologies jointly developed carrier-grade IP platform for the mobile environment. They incorporated Sun's Netra Compact PCI servers with Lucent's Flexent server.

Sun also announced a partnership with Noblestar to develop customizable solution sets, which have already been implemented with three customers.

Maintain course

Perhaps the only real surprise coming out of Wireless 2001 was the general lack of concern over the bearish market. Many vendors still seemed intent on marketing their wares full-throttle, despite the fact that carriers may well be spending less on infrastructure this year than in happier economic times.

But with a revised, more realistic view of 3G, applications developers, base station peddlers and microwave radio players showed that they are trying to listen to their customers.

The network managers

Marconi Communications is one mainstream supplier that continues to flesh out its wireless strategy through acquisitions and product announcements, some of which were highlighted at the show. “We're trying to create end-to-end capability for customers,” said Clifford Wagner Jr., senior vice president of the Americas for Marconi's MSI subsidiary, which Marconi acquired in June of last year.

Marconi doesn't see itself competing with the likes of Nokia and Ericsson, which “look at us and realize we're not looking to slug it out in the heavy base station cell site deals,” Wagner said. Instead, Marconi is focusing its efforts on developing countries in Central and South America and the Asia/Pacific region. “We see a strategic thrust in underserved markets,” Wagner said.

A tool for tapping those markets is the Metaview network management platform, which Marconi's MSI division rolled out at the GSM World Congress. Metaview enables operators to view RF performance and manage frequency spectrum.

The benefit for the user is being able to overlay performance data on top of geo-referenced maps, said Ian Munro, business director of network management for MSI. “All the info is poured [into the system] like a melting pot,” he said.

Metaview enables carriers to analyze low-performance cell sites to determine where more coverage is needed, as well as prioritize daily work orders. The analysis tool will be available in June or July.