Does your spectrum have the EDGE?

date: May 10, 2002

Operators will always be interested in increasing their spectrum and using their existing spectrum more efficiently. Tuning and fine-tuning a network to get the best quality and capacity out of it is an integral part of an operator’s job.

Stefan Jelvin, Strategic Product Manager WCDMA and GSM at Ericsson, says: “Spectrum can be seen as a natural resource with limited availability. Operators must make the best use of that expensive investment.”

The key advantage offered by EDGE technology is that it can triple spectrum efficiency in GSM/GPRS networks. For data-rich packet services, such as video, this offers outstanding quality, and for best-effort data, such as e-mails, EDGE offers six times the spectrum efficiency. “This is particularly efficient for operators with a high number of GPRS users in the network,” Jelvin says.

With EDGE, operators have a choice. They can either have three times more users, or they can keep the same number of users but increase their capacity. An end user used to taking 30 seconds to download a file, send a mail and access his or her office calendar will suddenly find with an EDGE-enhanced network that the same process only takes 10 seconds.

To understand the capacity increase you can compare it to a train that can pull eight trucks carrying different goods. The GSM/GPRS train can, for example, pull five voice trucks and three trucks filled with data. Add EDGE and the five voice trucks remain the same, but all the data has been squeezed into one truck, leaving two trucks free to carry even more traffic and goods.

An integrated EDGE/GSM and WCDMA network offers even better service. Fully implemented it will make efficient use of the combined WCDMA and GSM spectrum, treating both spectrums as one and increasing efficiency through load-sharing and inter-system hand-overs.

If GSM and WCDMA coverage exist in parallel, Adaptive Traffic Control could be used to efficiently steer the traffic. Where there is only voice traffic, operators can get 8 percent more capacity. But with high-speed data traffic the potential is enormous. “In a scenario like that,” says Jelvin, “you can squeeze in 50 percent more users.”

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