At Mobile World Congress, Huawei and Qualcomm will demonstrate a Scalable UMTS solution that improves spectrum utilization by using a half bandwidth channel. Many mobile operators are looking to re-farm their GSM 900MHz spectrum. However, more than half of these operators own less than 5 MHz bandwidth of contiguous spectrum.
Huawei and Qualcomm said their Scalable UMTS helps this movement to spectrum re-farming.
Huawei and Qualcomm have successfully completed end-to-end testing of a Scalable UMTS prototype in November 2012 at Huawei’s Shanghai laboratory facilities. The testing showed that Scalable UMTS in a half-bandwidth channel provides the same spectral efficiency as normal UMTS.
“We are working with Huawei to drive the UMTS/HSPA evolution and commercial deployment of Scalable UMTS,” said Samir Soliman, Vice President of Technology at Qualcomm Research, Qualcomm Technologies’ R&D division. “As part of Qualcomm’s 1000x initiative to address the wireless industry’s unprecedented data demand, Scalable UMTS was designed to help operators maximize the data capacity and value of their existing spectrum. With varied use cases of Scalable UMTS, this band-agnostic technology is beneficial to both emerging and developed regions. In emerging regions of the world, Scalable UMTS can accelerate GSM re-farming, whereas in developed regions, the technology enables efficient utilization of spectrum resources.”
Scalable UMTS is currently a 3GPP Release 12 study item and will be commercially available from Huawei.
