Sprint PCS said software problems by one of its two equipment vendors will delay the launch of personal communications service in some markets by year’s end, but the company still intends to roll out service in five to 10 markets by the end of the year.
“We have experienced delays associated with administrative and maintenance software,” said Sprint PCS spokesman Tom Murphy.
Parent company Sprint Spectrum L.P. is licensed to offer PCS in 29 major trading areas nationwide. The carrier is using Code Division Multiple Access technology to deploy the service.
The delay will be in markets being built by equipment manufacturers Northern Telecom Ltd. and Qualcomm Inc. of San Diego. The two companies have jointly developed the software at issue, which manages operation, administrative and maintenance functions.
Qualcomm said it is confident the problems will be fixed by January, saying a delay of one month shouldn’t be considered significant.
Service should be available in the Nortel-equipped markets by the end of first quarter 1997, Sprint said. The five to 10 markets built by Lucent Technologies Inc. will be launched according to schedule, Murphy said.
This is the second CDMA deployment in the United States to experience software problems. AirTouch Communications Inc. wasn’t able to turn on the rest of its CDMA cellular network in Los Angeles until last week. Only a portion of the Motorola Inc.-built system was turned on in May.
“The Motorola software problems which occurred early this year are behind us,” said Lee Cox, vice chairman of AirTouch Communications.
Qualcomm Chairman Dr. Irwin Jacobs predicted earlier this year that any problems encountered with the commercialization of CDMA will likely be software or hardware in nature, rather than problems with Interim Standard 95.
“The CDMA air interface standard hasn’t changed. CDMA technology has been stable. There are now large amounts of hardware and software, and we’re going through the software tuning stage but not in the sense of changing CDMA characteristics,” Jacobs said in April.
In May, Sprint scaled down its original launch ambitions from 20 to 25 markets by year-end 1996 to 15 to 20 markets. There are no site acquisition problems associated with the delay, nor is the equipment provider facing a penalty, Sprint said.
“We are confident these matters will be worked out, and we’re in the last phase of testing,” Murphy said.
Nortel’s stock dipped slightly following the announcement Dec. 4. Sprint still expects to launch 65 markets by mid-year 1997.
SkyTel Corp. experienced embarrassing problems after a high-fanfare launch of its new two-way paging system in September of 1995. By March, public criticism forced SkyTel to admit it was experiencing software malfunctions and had installed an insufficient number of receivers.
