Written by: Tomas Hedberg and Stefan Parkvall

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WCDMA is rapidly emerging as the leading global third-generation (IMT-2000) standard, providing simultaneous support for a wide range of services with different characteristics on a common 5 MHz carrier.

The current WCDMA specification fully satisfies the IMT-2000 requirements, including support for data rates of up to 2 Mbit/s in indoor or small-cell outdoor environments, wide-area coverage at rates of up to 384 kbit/s, and support for high-rate packet-data and circuit-switched services. Thus, the introduction of third-generation cellular systems allows operators to offer a vast selection of services to meet subscriber demands. Ericsson’s WCDMA products are positioned to guarantee cost-effective delivery of these services.

When launching a WCDMA network, most operators will initially focus on delivering stable coverage over a large area—capacity is a lesser concern. The initial deployment will also support essential end-user services, including radio access bearers for circuit- and packet-switched data communication as well as location-based services.

Over time, the capacity requirements will increase as more and more subscribers enter the system. Likewise, greater support will be needed for end-user services—that is, multimedia services, high-precision location services, and high-speed packet-data services will become increasingly important. These evolving requirements can be supported through enhancements and additions of new functionality in the current WCDMA standard (R99) and through future additions to it.

In this article, the authors discuss ways of evolving the Ericsson family of WCDMA products. Because packet data is expected to have an increasingly important role, the scope of this article is mostly limited to packet data services. The authors outline enhancements to the current standard and propose a subsequent evolution.

[First published in Ericsson Review no. 03, 2001]