News of the Week

Northern Telecom gave the industry a glimpse of the new intelligence of personal communication services last week when it announced the successful completion of the first U.S. trials of its Smart Base Transceiver Station equipment. The trials were conducted in portions of American Personal Communications' operational network in the Washington, D.C./Baltimore region, and in Chapel Hill and Research Triangle Park, N.C., where BellSouth Personal Communications is building a system. In both locations, Nortel Smart BTS equipment was mounted alongside conventional base station and antenna gear, and drive tests were conducted to compare coverage capabilities. The results showed the Smart BTSs provided 50% more coverage than conventional equipment, according to Nortel. BellSouth gave the equipment high marks for its ability to enhance coverage and provide other benefits. "The trial proved to us that the antennas met their design criteria, and even exceeded them a bit," said Eric Ensor, president of BellSouth Personal Communications. "In addition to helping coverage, we also believe they're going to help voice quality, particularly in in-building cases." In suburban environments such as Chapel Hill, where carriers are more concerned with getting inside homes and buildings than with extending the coverage potential of each base station, Smart BTSs can help improve transmission quality, said Malcom Cowan, general manager for North American PCS at Nortel. "When you don't have to cover big regions and you're not trying to project a base station as far as it can go, voice quality is better," Cowan said. APC tested the equipment in some of the more rural regions of its market. Shenandoah Personal Communications, which has a management agreement with APC that gives it operating authority in four of the basic trading areas that make up APC's region, conducted the tests. In outlying areas, the equipment should ease network buildout and save money, said William Pirtle, vice president of operations at Shenandoah. Although Smart BTSs cost about 30% more than conventional equipment, the tradeoff comes in reduced buildout requirements, he said. "It's going to make a big difference in the number of antennas that will have to be deployed, particularly in rural areas," said Pirtle. "We can build fewer towers. That's where the real savings is." Smart BTS equipment was designed to help mitigate the decreased coverage capabilities of higher frequency transmission, said Cowan. "The law of physics says that the further you go up in frequency, the less coverage you get," he said. "We set out to come up with an antenna that compensated for the fact that coverage at 2 GHz isn't as good." The result is equipment that provides coverage comparable with 800 MHz cellular systems using the same number of cell sites, and that has the potential to rival code division multiple access (CDMA), said one analyst. "It definitely shows that there are capabilities that put a GSM PCS solution at a cost advantage to traditional cellular, and maybe even competitive to CDMA," said David Yedwab, vice president of The Eastern Management Group, a consultancy based in Parsippany, N.J. The performance of the Nortel equipment should alert wireless providers of the network flexibility of enhanced equipment, Yedwab said. "Nobody should be thinking about any of these technologies as stagnant," he said. "This shows that while there are going to be significant choices that providers have to make, there will be continuous improvements." Ericsson to cook up InterCel networks Jason Meyers, Associate Editor-News Ericsson announced last week that it has been awarded a contract to supply infrastructure for InterCel's four personal communication services markets in the Southeast. The $200 million contract for PCS 1900 mobile switching centers, base stations and base station controllers covers the carrier's Atlanta; Birmingham, Ala.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Memphis/Jackson markets. Ericsson was tapped for the deal because of the price competitiveness of its PCS gear and the experience and resources it could bring to the network buildout, said Allen Smith, president of InterCel. The vendor will be installing its equipment and optimizing the network's performance and handoff capabilities, he said. "That is really how you get your network up to quality," Smith said. InterCel plans to launch commercial service in Memphis, Birmingham and Jacksonville in October, he said. The company purchased a license from GTE earlier this month for Atlanta, where a service launch is targeted for the second half of 1997. "We intend to deploy our network on a very broad scale from the beginning," Smith said. "Customers will expect that." Ericsson has now garnered seven U.S. PCS infrastructure contracts, five for PCS 1900 equipment and two for upbanded time division multiple access.