Written by: Anders Birkedal, Eddie Corbett and Keith Woodfield

Download PDF file

Ericsson and Vodafone have jointly built a pre-commercial WCDMA network in the UK. During 2001 and the first half of 2002, the network has been used to evaluate various aspects of operating a WCDMA network, and for preparation for commercial services scheduled to start in 2002. The work mainly focused on evaluating the basic radio network characteristics of the WCDMA standard in a live environment.

The testing of a complete network under realistic operating conditions based on commercial hardware and pre-releases of software has been extremely valuable to Ericsson and Vodafone.

The authors describe the network configuration, the test setup, various areas of testing, and give some examples of test results.

[First published in Ericsson Review no. 02, 2002]