Gearing up for upcoming personal communications services auctions, Qualcomm Inc. has introduced several products based on its Code Division Multiple Access digital technology, including the company’s first portable phone for the PCS market.
Qualcomm’s eight ounce QCP-1900 transmits radio frequency power at extremely low levels, giving the phone five hours of talk time and 72 hours of standby time on a single battery, surpassing power capabilities of many high-end cellular handsets by more than four times, according to Qualcomm.
The new portable also provides broad coverage and extended capacity. The phone uses Qualcomm’s 13 kilobit per second voice coding option, designed to provide voice clarity comparable to that of a wired phone, according to the company.
Other features in the QCP-1900 are 10-number speed dialing, auto redial and answer, 99 memory storage units with alphanumeric tagging, and 32-digit dialing. A separate memory retains the last 10 calls.
User-friendly components include menu-driven interaction, a slide-up ear piece that retracts to prevent accidental dialing, and a large, easy-to-read, back-lit LCD display and 20-button keypad.
Qualcomm Personal Electronics, a joint venture established in March between Qualcomm and Sony Electronics, is manufacturing the QCP-1900 and anticipates the new phone will hit the market in mid-1995, along with the company’s CDMA QCS-2000 PCS modular system, which will include base stations with microcells, distributed-antenna capabilities and base station controllers.
San Diego-based Qualcomm also introduced a business model it developed for evaluating the financial performance of PCS networks. The company said its PCS Auction Planning Software can be individually customized for various characteristics of a market, including its coverage area, building types, minutes of use per subscriber, population density, pricing plans, subscriber use, network rollout schedule and other issues that PCS providers will need to address.
“Evaluating deployment plans for a network, be it the technology to employ, the rollout schedule to assume or the pricing plans to use, involves a complex set of tradeoffs,” said Allen Salmasi, president of Qualcomm’s wireless telecommunications division.
“Our PCS planning financial model provides key financial data that could be used in developing a bid strategy and a PCS business plan.”
Qualcomm also introduced its PureVoice system, which combines CDMA technology with the company’s 13 kbps variable rate vocoder, known as QCELP-13.
PureVoice can be used in PCS networks, but also is available for cellular and wireless local loop applications.