EDGE Front and Center
Wireless Review
June 01, 2003
By Dan O'Shea
If you use mobile data services on a GPRS handset, you may not spend too much time thinking about what you can't do with those services. However, if someone let you try a device that ran all your applications three to six times faster than your handset, would you want to give it back?
If your answer is "No," you've validated a decision that Comsys Mobile, a small baseband processor company based in Israel, made several years ago to develop EDGE technology while the mobile industry still seemed undecided about the pace of 3G deployment. It was a risk at the time, and it seemed even more of a risk in recent years as GPRS uptake sputtered. But now, with carriers like AT&T Wireless readying their expanding GPRS networks for the migration to EDGE, the gamble is set to pay off.
"EDGE had fallen off the map until recently. It was difficult to dictate when adoption would happen," said Ron Cohen, president, chief operating officer and co-founder of Comsys Mobile. "Now it's really happening."
AT&T Wireless - whose chairman, John Zeglis, has pinpointed nationwide EDGE adoption as one of the company's major goals for 2003 - currently has about 93% of its network ready for EDGE implementation, said Margaret Marino, vice president of technology evangelism for AT&T's Technology Development Group. The entire network will be fully upgraded by the end of the year, she added.
That planned deployment will make AT&T Wireless one of the world's leading EDGE network operators. When asked how the carrier knows the timing is right, Marino relied on a familiar kind of logic: "If you have broadband access at home, remember when you moved from dial-up to broadband? Did you ever want to go back to dial-up?"
If "No" is your answer... well, you get the idea.
Comsys Mobile and AT&T Wireless represent opposite ends of the EDGE spectrum. The developer of digital baseband processing technology has been around since 1995 and holds 10 EDGE-related technology patents. The company also engineers processors that support GSM, GPRS, WCDMA and UMTS technologies, which are used in both network equipment and devices. Comsys counts Texas Instruments as its primary partner for getting its baseband units into handset designs, and it has one U.S.-based network equipment partner, whose identity Cohen declined to reveal.
As a company at the earliest stages of the technology adoption curve, Comsys often has to sweat long development, testing, product manufacturing and purchasing phases before knowing whether its patents will be worth more than the paper they are printed on. It's sometimes the device makers that make Comsys sweat the most: "Timely and abundant availability of cheap handsets is often the No. 1 issue affecting user adoption of new services," Cohen said.
AT&T, meanwhile, has much clearer short-term visibility into when and how all facets of the technology adoption food chain will come together. Marino agreed that handset manufacturers sometimes leave the rest of that food chain hanging, but she said that isn't happening in the migration to EDGE. [New EDGE-compliant handsets from Nokia made their market debut last month and are available from AT&T Wireless.]
"You usually see the network being ready, and waiting on the device to become available," she said. "This time that isn't the case, and it should be just a better situation overall for adoption."
User readiness and market synchronization are just two of the things that make AT&T Wireless and other carriers - including Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile - increasingly confident about the migration to EDGE. It is not a network technology in desperate search of a killer app, nor is it moving ahead without the appropriate gear. It's just better and faster than GPRS, and it's ready for market introduction.
"The speed of GPRS is relatively limited," said Cohen. "Theoretically, it's 30 kb/s to 40 kb/s at best. You can sync with Outlook at that speed, but not as efficiently as EDGE, which is more like 100 kb/s."
In addition to satisfying the need for speed among customers, EDGE also provides network efficiencies that make a compelling case for carrier deployment. "EDGE uses about one time slot where GPRS requires three, so there is a definite capacity improvement," Marino said. Also, EDGE is deployed through a simple and inexpensive software upgrade to existing GPRS network equipment. "You aren't looking at having to rip out any major pieces of the network to put it in," she said.
Kris Rinne, vice president of technology at Cingular Wireless, said the service provider has started a gradual implementation of EDGE technology. "Our first markets will be up in late 2003 and almost all of them by early 2004," she said. "The driving factor is really to enable greater channel density that will help both Cingular and its customers."
Another byproduct of EDGE technology is how complementary it is with Wi-Fi. With a typical usage speed of almost 100 kb/s and a potential maximum speed of about 477 kb/s, EDGE is much closer to the average 1 Mb/s speed of a shared Wi-Fi connection than GPRS' dial-up-like bandwidth. That will make it easier for carriers to create integrated EDGE/Wi-Fi offerings because users traveling between the two types of networks will not have as far to fall in bandwidth when a device switches from Wi-Fi coverage to EDGE.
Cohen also said that Comsys is looking at developing processors that combine 802.11 and EDGE technologies at the baseband level. The pace of this development will be spurred by how quickly carriers incorporate Wi-Fi hot spots into their network strategies.
AT&T also is looking to the future - and it's a future that goes well beyond EDGE. In reality, this next phase of network technology is merely a quick stop on a path toward even greater network capacity and user data rates. Marino said AT&T Wireless plans to deploy UMTS - which offers about 50% greater bandwidth than EDGE - in at least four major cities in the U.S. by the middle of 2004.
Although EDGE adoption may have once seemed like a daunting step, for carriers it's clearly not a destination as much as another mile marker on a long-distance journey. And as users may realize, the rewards of that journey make it very hard to turn back and head in the other direction.
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