Daily Independent (Lagos)
Emma Okonji
23 June 2009
Lagos — Qualcomm, a research and development company, whose focus is to facilitate low-cost technology for operators and end-users of the coded division multiple access (CDMA) technology, has unveiled new initiatives that will boost CDMA growth.
At the just concluded West and Central Africa forum in Abuja, Qualcomm spoke on its new initiative to bundle CDMA and GSM technologies into one chipset and loaded into a single mobile device.
Vice President, Business Development, sub-Sahara Africa for Qualcomm, Mr. James Munn, who revealed the new initiatives at an interview session with our correspondent, said the initiative will be relevant for the Nigerian market that has both the GSM and CDMA networks.
According to him, the initiative is a demonstration of Qualcomm's support for convergence, which he said, will save the consumer a lot of things since he will no longer be worried about what he is buying anymore because in the future, his phone will be able to handle CDMA, WCDMA, Rev A and B, all bundled in one chipset and loaded into a single mobile device.
With this development, CDMA operators could roam on GSM because the handset will support all the technology, but that is in the near future, Munn said.
He added that Qualcomm has equally come up with a more robust platform for the CDMA operations, which he called 1X Advance. He however said the 1X Advance will not be available until sometime next year.
It is exciting because it has both economic and environmental benefits and it increases the capacity of a base station by up to two or three times its actual capacity.
This means that operators can increase the capacity of their networks without installing additional base station or providing additional backbone, Munn said.
"With 1X Advance, any CDMA operator with about 10 million subscribers on its network can have the capacity to handle trice the number within a space of two years without putting up additional base station. 1X Advance is a software upgrade on a base station, and this represents the voice service.
What Qualcomm is doing is to ensure that CDMA has a revolution path to Long Term Evolution (LTE), and that, he said, is very important because the CDMA operator has a revolution path that he can compete with voice and data.
Qualcomm, he added, is currently working with vendors to achieve the feat.
The new Qualcomm chipsets can go with a modem that will be connected to a laptop and it handles CDMA, WCDMA and LTE.
Speaking on the CDMA point of view, Munn said Nigeria is clearly the biggest CDMA operator in Africa. For Qualcomm, Nigeria has become a reference country for the advancement of CDMA technology.
Describing the CDMA technology Munn said it is broadly split into three frequency bands, 450, 800 and 1900 bands. All of these bands, he said, are covered in Nigeria by different operators. Starcomms, he said, is deploying the 1900, Multilinks is deploying 800 and 1900, while Visafone is deploying 1900, and these are the three large CDMA operators in Nigeria.
The true situation of these frequency bands is that the lower the frequency, the larger the coverage of the base station. An operator with a 450MHz band will have a cell that will cover twice the distance of that 1900 MHz will cover.
According to Munn, we are now in a stage in the CDMA technology where the handset is no longer relegated to one band because Qualcomm has introduced multi-band chips and multi-band handsets.
So it is quite possible in the future that people could change their operator at will like it is done with the GSM technology.
Speaking on the challenges of CDMA deployment in Nigeria, Munn said low income level of users is affecting its wide spread. He said many want to be connected and have their own handsets but cannot afford to buy expensive handsets.
Qualcom, he said, understands this and came up with entry level handsets that are affordable to people. With the help of hardware manufacturers of the CDMA operators and the involvement of our suppliers, we were able to bring in CDMA handsets that are even below $20 (N2, 800.) Munn said
Other challenges according to him, are the connections from base station to the switch, but that, he said, has been taken care of by the microwave and fibre optic. In the last two years, CDMA operators are developing a lot of fibre optic backbone as well as improving the radio links.
In Nigeria, CDMA operators are laying a lot of fibre optic cables and this means more access to broadband, he said.
Nigeria, he added, has witnessed explosive growth on CDMA, closely followed by Angola in the African market.
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