UPDATE: Cingular commits to UMTS/HSDPA

Cingular today one-upped competitors Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS in the 3G technology wars announcing that it would commercially launch UMTS high speed downlink packet access services in 2005.

Cingular said it would build upon newly absorbed AT&T Wireless’s six-market UMTS launches to begin the buildout of a major city and suburban 3G buildout throughout 2005, culminating in nationwide coverage in most metro areas by the end of 2006.

The network build out will be handled by Lucent Technologies, Ericsson and Siemens. Surprisingly, Nortel Networks did not make the list, even though it provided the core technology for AT&T Wireless’s initial four-market UMTS rollout earlier this year. Lucent, however, landed a critical UMTS after being outpaced in W-CDMA deployments by its other global competitors.

While Lucent has been very active in the enterprise UMTS space, supplying data cards with partner Novatel, the vendor before today hadn’t landed a UMTS radio-access equipment deal aside from a few small scale deployments while Ericsson and its other competitors ran away with the market. Lucent, however, said that it has been active in pursuing UMTS technology and today’s deal with one of the world’s largest carriers shows that it is definitely a major competitor.

"It’s a very significant step for us," said John Leonard, director of Lucent’s UMTS portfolio. "It allows us to leverage our UMTS portfolio.

Lucent will supply both edge and core equipment, including basestations for both 850 MHz and 1900 MHz micro-cell and macro-cell deployments, radio network controllers, and circuit-switched core infrastructure based on its softswitch/media gateway architecture, which can be easily upgraded to a IP multimedia subsystem platform if Cingular chooses to launch IMS. Since the UMTS network will be separate from the GSM network, all of the vendors start with clean slates, but all of them will have to integrate their architectures with the legacy GSM networks to support handoff between the networks. In the case of Ericsson it can deploy its dual-mode GSM/UMTS basestations, but Lucent will have to integrate its UMTS deployment with other vendors’ legacy networks.

Each vendor will build a portion of the network and supply the HSDPA software upgrades for their portions. No specific dollar amounts were given for each vendor’s contract. Nor did Cingular release an overall figure for the cost of the rollout. In addition, Cingular announced it is contracting with Nokia to enhance its existing GSM/GPRS/EDGE networks and possibly support 3G rollouts in the future. Nokia, Motorola and LG have all committed to deliver UMTS PCS/cellular handsets for the new network in 2005.

"Today’s announcement marks a significant milestone in our commitment to speed the deployment of third-generation wireless services across the nation," said Kris Rinne, chief technical officer for Cingular. "The selection of these vendors will bring tremendous intellectual capital to the team as we work to achieve our common goal to bring the next generation of mobile multimedia services to consumer and businesses."

Verizon Wireless is now engaged in a nationwide rollout of CDMA 1X EV-DO services, after an initial trial launch last year, using Lucent and Nortel equipment. Sprint PCS has committed to a similar launch of EV-DO in 2005, using its existing infrastructure vendors Samsung, Motorola, Nortel and Lucent. Though EV-DO has proven to be faster than UMTS in most field trials, HSPDA is expected to raise the bar. The technology has a theoretical download ceiling of 14 Mb/s, but carriers are targeting average throughputs of 400 kb/s to 700 kb/s compared to EV-DO’s 300 kb/s to 500 kb/s. HSDPA’s lower latency, however, would give it additional speed advantages, allowing for faster loading of Web content and even the possibility of VoIP. Though several CDMA carriers have talked about the deployment of a VoIP-capable DO technology, called EV-DO revision A, no carrier has yet committed to its deployment.