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“GSM is absolutely important,” says Frank Meywerk, executive vice president for Radio Access Network (RAN) planning and deployment, T-Mobile Germany. “It’s our voice platform and we still generate a substantial piece of our revenues with GSM.” 

As the leader on the market and facing tough competition, T-Mobile Germany is keen to introduce more services, get more usage and attract more customers to its GSM networks. 
The GSM upgrade includes EDGE capability, closing a capacity gap for subscribers and strengthening T-Mobile’s GSM offering and securing its lead.

T-Mobile Germany’s Chief Technology Officer Joachim Horn says: “EDGE has performance closer to UMTS than to GPRS, both from the speed and the latency – and that is currently specific to Ericsson. That also means it was a good supplier decision, and it helps us to help the rural areas in Germany get access to high-speed data and high-speed services.”

Yet the operator returns to voice as the primary service to provide and continually improve. Horn is keenly interested in Wideband AMR, a better compression technology for voice similar to .mp3 for music.

Technology leadership

“We already have AMR, with good results, and feedback on the GSM base stations, but we also want Wideband AMR in GSM,” he says. “This means on the terminal side and on infrastructure, vendors have to develop and introduce it."

Ericsson has now replaced 5000 base stations and will replace 5000 more in the coming year, so far without incident and without any subscriber complaint. T-Mobile’s Meywerk says the success of the project, and Ericsson’s continued technology leadership, bode well for the future relationship.

“What is interesting and good from Ericsson is that we feel they are developing the GSM system further,” he says. “We need, of course, more features, we need EDGE development and beyond that even more stages, and we see that Ericsson is committed to GSM. That is very important for us because we will see GSM for many, many years to come.”