New 3G Industry Group Formed

A new alliance was launched yesterday at 3GSM to accelerate the growing success of UMTS TDD as the leading standard for delivering wide-area wireless broadband and other high-speed packet based services. The Global UMTS TDD Alliance has been founded by members of the UMTS TDD community, including both operators and vendors from around the world, and is sanctioned by the GSM Alliance.

Vendors participating in the forum include Andrew Corporation, Axcera, Fastcomm, InCode Telecom, IPWireless, MRiC, Possio, Samsung, and UTStarcom. Also joining the group as technical advisors are Professor Masao Nakagawa and Professor Riaz Esmailzadeh from Keio University in Japan, early pioneers in the development of TD-CDMA.

Like the better-known variant of the UMTS standard, WCDMA, which uses Frequency Division (FDD), UMTS TDD supports full mobility, wide area indoor coverage, USIM authentication, and other advanced mobile standard features. But unlike WCDMA, which uses paired spectrum to transmit voice and data, UMTS TDD was designed to work in the unpaired 3G frequencies that have been licensed in many countries across Europe and Asia. In fact, more than 120 of the world's largest mobile operators have spectrum dedicated for the technology. UMTS TDD Systems have also been rebanded to work in other spectrum bands typically used for broadband wireless.

One of the most significant benefits of using UMTS TDD for packet based applications is its support of variable asymmetry, meaning an operator can dictate how much capacity is allocated to downlink versus uplink. As the traffic patterns for data typically heavily favor the downlink, this results in better use of spectrum assets and higher efficiency. Users also statistically share the air interface in a very efficient manner, and the standard also supports many signal processing techniques that allow the system to get better throughput further from the cell site. UMTS TDD Systems have proven capable of meeting the primary requirements of operators looking to build business models based on wireless broadband and mobile broadband in ways that other newly developed standards are years away from. "

Posted to the site on 26th February 2004