3G's DSP Breakthrough

The right base station DSP reduces risk and increases flexibility for operators and OEMs alike.

By Bob Darilek
Wireless Infrastructure
Texas Instruments

When cell phones first hit the U.S. market back in 1983, analysts predicted that the new devices would struggle to reach 1 million units sold by 2000. Obviously, that forecast was off by a wide margin. By the beginning of 2005, there were more than 175 million wireless users in the United States.

Worldwide growth is equally impressive. Just within the GSM family of technologies, there were more than 1.275 billion users worldwide at the end of 2004, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. That is up from about 1 billion at the beginning of 2004.

Despite this success, there is always room for improvement. On the service provider side, strong customer growth and the increase in data and multimedia services make it all the more important for operators to upgrade their network (infrastructure) equipment to support new revenue-generating services. For network infrastructure vendors, more wireless users means that their service provider customers will be increasingly on the look-out for equipment that is flexible enough to support the new, innovative services necessary to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.

A prime example is UMTS, where the number of users has already hit 16 million worldwide, up from 2.7 million at the end of 2003. Although the technology is relatively nascent compared to its older cousins GSM, GPRS, and EDGE, some operators already have plans for aggressive high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) deployments once commercial equipment is available. One such carrier is Cingular Wireless, which plans to start deploying HSDPA this year in every market that it upgrades to UMTS. Another example is mmO2, which plans to launch Europe's first commercial HSDPA service by summer 2005. A major reason that HSDPA is particularly attractive to European operators is that with every competitor using the GSM family of technologies, each service provider is eager to deploy next-generation versions as quickly as possible to help differentiate itself in the eyes of potential customers.

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