Look what is in bold:
The LAS-CDMA challenge
However, another Chinese CDMA technology threatens to supersede TD-SCDMA and the Western platforms. Large Area Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (LAS-CDMA) has been developed by LinkAir, a Chinese-American company which has venture capital funding from a number of major sources including Intel and IDG, best known in the US as a magazine publisher, but a big venture capital investor in China.
LinkAir makes some big claims for LAS-CDMA. It promises a throughput of 5.53 Mbps at the cell, well over twice the 2.4 Mbps throughput specified in the W-CDMA and CDMA2000 standards. It is also designed to work on the same economical 1.25MHz carrier specified for CDMA2000, with the exception that it claims to be able to carry three times as many voice calls. What’s more, its platform can be overlaid on both W-CDMA and CDMA2000 networks, as well as TD-SCDMA and the European 3G TDMA-based UTRA standard.
According to vice president, standard and business development Frederic Leroudier, LAS-CDMA differs from other 3G CDMA proposals through the use of patented coding which reduces interference between cells and capacity loss caused by multipath interference. He says the techniques are patented and, significantly, claims that no royalties are owed to Qualcomm.
Leroudier is critical of the claims made for CDMA2000 and W-CDMA. He says their relatively limited spectral efficiency caps voice capacity on their networks, even though this will be as much of an issue for operators as data speeds. He adds that W-CDMA suffers additional limitations from its use of a 5 MHz carrier, which further reduces efficient use of spectrum.
Leroudier also claims that CDMA2000 and W-CDMA will not achieve the theroetical data rates set in their specifications. "The average throughput of a CDMA2000 network is 600 kbps. Ours will be much higher."
For him, TD-SCDMA is little better, which he says suffers a "mobility problem."
"They are only marginally better than 2G," he asserts.
Quick progress
It’s still early days for LinkAir. It only announced its technology last March and has just completed its second-round of financing. Interestingly, it operates twin headquarters in Beijing and San Jose, Calif. and has 130 employees in total. Marketing director Jerri Barrett says the company could be best described as in "pre-IPO stage."
But the company’s progress to date has been impressive. It has attracted one of the world’s pre-eminent wireless technologists, Dr. William Lee, as its chairman. Lee was previously the chief scientist of Vodafone-Airtouch. Its founding CEO, Ting Zheng, was previously with Sprint PCS.
The company has gained noteworthy endorsements from China’s two cellular operators, China Mobile and China Unicom, as well as China’s Ministry of Information Industry. A media report that Sprint PCS was trialing the technology is dismissed as incorrect by Barrett but she does confirm that the company is actively talking with a number of leading global operators.
The company’s business plan calls for it to emulate Qualcomm’s successful model. "We do not intend to manufacture, but instead intend to license our technology and manufacture chip sets," says Leroudier.
One immediate goal for the company is to seek International Telecommunication Union recognition of its technology as an official "IMT-2000" 3G platform — a distinction currently bestowed on TD-SCDMA, W-CDMA, CDMA2000 and EDGE, the upgrade path for TDMA networks. With the first LAS-CDMA call demonstrated just last August, Leroudier forecasts that the company will have an operational prototype network in 2001 and a commercial product release, initially in China, by the end of 2002.
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