Experiences of operating a pre-commercial WCDMA network
Anders Birkedal, Eddie Corbett, Karim Jamal, Keith Woodfield · 2002
During 2002, operators around the world are planning to introduce third-generation mobile services to their subscribers. Many have selected the WCDMA system from Ericsson for building the infrastructure to provide these services. The WCDMA standard for the mobile network is the core technology for efficient mobile multimedia services and for realizing the vision of true Mobile Internet access. The standard, which has been developed after many years of research at Ericsson, is now the state-of-theart telecommunications technology. One area of focus of the research has been to get adequate performance in the air interface (between the network and user equipment) in order to handle the new mobile data services such as Internet access, MMS, video calls, and IP multimedia calls. For commercial operations of thirdgeneration mobile networks with paying customers, Ericsson is currently introducing WCDMA Release 2. Release 1 was introduced in 2001 for use as a pre-commercial service by operators. It was used for the main part of the joint Ericsson-Vodafone precommercial tests. Release 1 has also been used for demonstrating WCDMA features, network roll-out, network tuning, and for showing compliance with technical requirements from regulators. To ensure the expected performance at the commercial introduction of the WCDMA system, Ericsson built a pre-commercial network in cooperation with Vodafone UK. The network has been used to test various operating aspects in a realistic environment before delivering hardware and software to