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EDGE market uptake doubles in speed
August 20, 2004
The US is at present the single largest market for EDGE. AT&T Wireless and Cingular offer EDGE to 250 million inhabitants and there are more than 50 operators in 27 countries in the Americas running or deploying EDGE.
And now Europe is catching up. Among the operators already in commercial operation are Westel in Hungary, Bité in Lithuania, TeliaSonera in Finland, Vipnet in Croatia, TIM in Italy and Eurotel in Slovakia. Operators such as Swisscom in Switzerland and Telenor in Norway are currently upgrading their GSM/GPRS networks with EDGE functionality.
Torsten Hunte, director of business development, says EDGE functions as a complement to WCDMA.
"The deployment of EDGE is done in parallel with the deployment of WCDMA, both starting in densely populated areas. This allows operators to enable new data services to all customer segments and, with that, stimulate data usage," Hunte says.
Since EDGE has a minor impact on existing GSM/GPRS networks provided by Ericsson, only minor hardware and software upgrades are needed, allowing a fast and simple network upgrade. This gives operators the opportunity to win larger market share by launching initial 3G services early, with wider national coverage.
"After covering the densely populated areas, WCDMA deployment continues towards a nation-wide coverage at a pace determined by local market conditions, just as the GSM roll-out did in the early 90's," Hunte says.
"GSM/GPRS/EDGE and WCDMA all belong to the same family of technology, allowing operators a smooth evolution to new high-end multimedia services."
With more than 50 commercial EDGE agreements, Ericsson is the supplier to 17 of the 22 operators that have launched the technology - more than all its competitors combined.
Ericsson is active in the Global mobile Supplier Association (GSA), which is the forum for leading GSM/3G suppliers worldwide. The objective of the GSA is to promote GSM/EDGE/WCDMA in new and existing markets, and to promote the evolution of GSM as the platform for delivery of third generation (3G) multimedia services.
Within these activities, the EDGE Operators Forum was created to position EDGE in the market. Hunte says operators originally had several misconceptions about EDGE, primarily that it was in competition with WCDMA. The forum has helped to correct those misconceptions. Forum events have reached more than 1000 operator representatives since the group was formed two years ago.
