3G mobile technology must complement
wireless LAN 802.11, not compete with it

Copyright 2002 Gale Group, Inc.
ASAP
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information Limited
Electronics Weekly...07/17/2002
From LexisNexis

By Melanie Reynolds
from CED Broadband Direct, July 17, 2002

Third-generation mobile technology will have to work in harmony with 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) technology rather than compete with it, according to Lucent Technologies Inc. and Qualcomm CDMA Technologies.

"We look at it as becoming a requirement. Some carriers see it as a threat while some say, 'it could have something for me'," says Bruce Dale, vice president of UMTS/W-CDMA products at Lucent.

Dale thinks that 802.11 is a threat to 3G in static locations, but there is no contest when mobility is required. He expects to see devices having 802.11 and 3G capability and the devices being able to switch seamlessly from one to the other when appropriate.

Qualcomm is so sure of the coexistence of both technologies that it is intending to include 802.11b capability in its CDMA chipsets next year.

"We look at 802.11 as being complementary to our chipsets," says Siegmund Redl, Qualcomm's director of marketing for Europe.

The comments were made at a live demonstration of 3G UMTS packet data services held at Lucent's office in Paris which used a commercial-sized Qualcomm UMTS test mobile and Lucent's commercial-grade UMTS infrastructure.

High-speed streaming video and Internet browsing capabilities of the technology were demonstrated while the phone, connected to a laptop, was moving around the area in a car.

Data rates of around 130 kbps were achieved in the demo, but Dale says this was due to a software limitation.

Although 3G's quoted data rate is 384 kbps, Dale is cautious about quoting data rates that would be available. "What we are expecting to see is three to four times faster than via a wire hook up," says Dale.