Lucent Technologies is enhancing its Flexent OneBTS base station to provide wireless telecommunication operators with expanded network coverage and capacity for UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) and cdma2000 (code division multiple access 2000) networks, the company said on Wednesday.
Lucent's OneBTS base station is a software-based radio platform for spread-spectrum 3G standards like UMTS and cdma2000, the company said in a statement. Spread spectrum is a communications technique that spreads a signal over a wide range of frequencies for transmission and then draws it back to its original makeup at the receiver.
An operator can configure the OneBTS base station to use diverse transmission techniques. The enhancements to the OneBTS base station will offer an optional intelligent antenna and IA/BLAST (Intel Corp. Architecture/Bell Labs Layered Space-Time) technology, Lucent said.
The OneBTS base station is configured with a pair of two antennas and has digital signal processing capabilities. The intelligent antennas can improve wireless coverage by as much as 70 percent or data throughput capacity by 100 percent, the company said.
BLAST technology assists with providing high data rates over fading wireless channels. BLAST technology splits a user's data stream into multiple substreams using an array of transmitter antennas to simultaneously launch the parallel substreams, according to Lucent. Since the user's data is sent in parallel over multiple antennas, the result is an increased transmission rate.
The enhancements will allow operators to incrementally upgrade their networks to deal with increased traffic without adding often costly base-station sites, said Paul Mankiewich, vice president and chief technical officer for Lucent's wireless business, in a statement.
Lucent's OneBTS base station platform will begin shipping during the latter half of 2001, The price of the OneBTS base station is based on the customer's configuration needs, according to the company. Lucent initially announced the OneBTS base station in June 2000.