News
Issue #2002 - 43 (November 2002)
(Updated Nov. 13, 2002)

INFRASTRUCTURE, PRODUCTS & SERVICES

Carrier Infrastructure Enhancement Tools - Cingular/Philips Interference Cancellation Chips

Cingular Completes Test of Philips' New Interference Cancellation Chips
Royal Philips Electronics and Cingular Wireless said they completed a successful commercial network field trial of single antenna interference cancellation (SAIC) chips for next generation GSM/GPRS mobile phones. The new semiconductor technology is designed to improve voice quality, decrease download times for data and increase the number of calls supported on the network. The technology will be part of Philips' cellular semiconductor baseband and other systems offered to cellular phone manufacturers globally. The Cingular trials were conducted on cellular prototypes from Philips. Philips said its technology enables mobile phones to remove interference from undesired signals while efficiently focusing on the signals from the most appropriate base station. It provides network operators with shorter download times over GPRS data channels and offers more robust GSM communications, including Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) speech channels, which translate into higher spectral efficiency allowing operators to carry more calls per base station. As a result, network capacity can be increased and service quality improved for cellular subscribers, Philips said. (Source: EE Times, U.K.) 

RealNetworks expands relationship with Envivio for mobile MPEG-4
RealNetworks yesterday announced a deal that expands an already existing relationship with Envivio, a San Francisco-based spinoff of France Telecom whose software encodes video in the MPEG-4 standard. Under the deal, RealNetworks and Envivio will co-develop a product called the Mobile Producer that will allow both content producers and wireless carriers to turn content in any format into an MPEG-4 stream with a file size and data rate appropriate for the network in use. RealNetworks' Mobile Producer, based on Envivio's encoder, will support file formats approved by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), including MPEG-4, AAC, N-AMR, and H.263.

For more information: http://www.philips.com and http://www.envivio.com

MobileInfo Comments and Advisory: GSM/GPRS operators need and will benefit from any help they can get from noise-interference cancellation chips and adaptive multi-rate speech channels. It does not help wireless data but fewer speech channels leave more channels for GPRS.  Increase in spectral efficiency will make GPRS a bit closer to CDMA but it still has a long way to catch up. Mathematics tells us that it never will. 

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