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Telstra Behind Schedule On CDMA Migration |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Tuesday, 13 February 2007 |
Despite slow
progress in moving CDMA users across to its new 3G network, Telstra has
confirmed that it still plans to switch off the company's regional CDMA
network at the beginning of next year.
Despite CEO Sol Trujillo recently telling news site, AustralianIT, that the take-up of the "NextG" was promising, it has also been revealed the company has only achieved "a sixteenth" of it's target for the migration of users off the old CDMA network to the new WCDMA network.
According to the report concerning the loss of Telstra's newly appointed CIO, Fiona Balfour. Balfour, who has been at the company less than a year, after being poached from Qantas is believed to have bailed out of Telstra to escape the wrangling internal power struggles that were making the job unpalatable.
Like Qantas, Telstra has a significant investment in a hotchpotch of legacy systems 's and it is the difficulty in bringing databases together that is reportedly slowing down the attempts to get customers off CDMA to the new network.
Only 100,000 CDMA customers have been migrated according to the report.
The delay may not be such a great issue for the company however. The process of certifying that the new network provides equivalent coverage in the bush is still being carried out by ACMA contractors. Also work on the network is ongoing with a project to extend the range of its base stations about to be competed imminently.
According to a release from network partner Ericsson, the launch later this week will see Telstra achieve two major milestones. Not only will it be the world's first 200km cell range in a commercial mobile broadband network it will do so at the maximum network downlink speed of 14.4Mbps.
The whole NextG roll-out has taken place at a phenomenal pace. Trujillo said: "Since launching Next G with HSDPA, Telstra has doubled the volume of total data traffic carried on all of its wireless networks. With the new distance upgrades, even some of the most remote customers in outback Australia will be able to see the benefits."
The upgrade to Ericsson's Extended Range software will actually triple the network data capacity on the Telstra network by using High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) technology to achieve peak network speeds of up to 1.9Mbps in the uplink and 14.4Mbps in the downlink.
Even at the full 200km range downlink speeds of 2.3Mbps have been achieved during testing, says Ericsson and testing of 7.2Mbps data cards is underway with a planned roll-out of mid year.
It won't stop there though, Telstra has shown interest and support for the next generation HSPA+ which is currently under development by chip maker Qualcomm.
Announcing the expansion of its product roadmap to include HSPA+, Qualcomm has said it will begin sampling its first chipsets supporting HSPA+, by the end of this year with a planned roll-out in 2008.
This upgrade will push network downlink speeds to 28Mbps and uplink speeds to 11 Mbps.
Jon Gonner, executive managing director for wireless at Telstra is quoted in the Qualcomm release saying: "Telstra currently has the world's largest HSDPA network, and our future needs require even higher data rates to support inevitably bigger-bandwidth services, support for applications such as movie downloads, and an easy upgrade path.
"HSPA+ provides us with all of these capabilities, and we intend to roll the technology out to reinforce our position as having a leading-edge wireless data and voice network."
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