Ericsson Review unfolds and clarifies Ericsson’s technology and product strategy, showing customers how to make technology and solutions work.

The growing range of multimedia services represents an opportunity to tap into new revenue streams. To realize them operators need a single, convergent charging and billing solution that supports prepaid as well as postpaid payment options for all user services. It must integrate the management of subscribers, orders, and products and be able to rate and manage balances in real time. It must also allow operators to adjust their prices, offer promotions and enhance their service offerings.

Operators can study HSPA performance by simulating realistic deployments of 3GPP Release 7. Looking ahead, HSPA will need to support more high-volume users with high bit-rate requirements, lower latency, and longer battery times. Accordingly, Release 8 features multicarrier operation, higher-order modulation in combination with MIMO, and enhancements to common states. For Release 9, 3GPP is discussing support for up to 168Mbps using 20MHz of spectrum.

Push services are popular on the internet and in mobile environments. Internet push services often use podcast mechanisms, while mobile push services use SMS and WAP-push. Technical realizations today are based on dedicated point-to-point delivery. This article presents MBMS push fi le services as a scalability extension to unicast services. MBMS is thus used as a “capacity booster” for distributing popular content services.

Technologies in the IT industry are evolving to the point where they give telecom-grade levels of availability without the need for extensive in-house solutions. For select network segments, operators can attain this level of availability via the network solution and not just in individual nodes. Ericsson promotes and nurtures this evolution in order to establish open standards for designing scalable, reliable, and efficient systems.

Video-based entertainment and communication services are rapidly increasing in importance for operators of all network types. User demand for these services is driving requirements for greater bandwidth. Likewise, a maturing user base is demanding better-quality experiences. This article details the technical basis for digital video compression and how the quality and costs of video-based services are directly affected by the practical performance of video-compression technologies.

In radio, networks and multimedia, Ericsson Research has established itself as a central force in the way the world communicates. On the 10th anniversary of this institution’s founding, some central fi gures in the history of Ericsson Research look back on its legacy.