Metawave Communications Corp. last week expanded its SpotLight 2000 product line to include a Code Division Multiple Access/Advanced Mobile Phone Service smart antenna system that works with Motorola Inc.’s SC 9600 base station.
The SpotLight 2000 product also is compatible with Lucent Series II and Motorola HD II base stations.
The new product is designed to ease the migration from analog to digital by addressing cellular carriers’ need to still take care of their established analog base of customers while providing increased capacity for their digital subscribers.
In order to deploy digital service on cellular networks, carriers first must clear spectrum for the digital traffic. Metawave’s product tightens frequency re-use and improves trunking efficiencies to support the remaining analog traffic and make room for CDMA traffic.
To handle the CDMA traffic, carriers can use Metawave’s Sector Synthesis technology to configure cell sectorization patterns to balance traffic loads among sectors. In a situation where one sector faces a highway, one faces a suburban area and one faces a rural area, for example, the sector facing the highway could become overloaded, said Lowell Anderson, director of product management at Metawave. SpotLight 2000 balances traffic by shifting traffic from a capacity-strained sector to other sectors that have excess capacity due to their lighter traffic loads, he said.
The balancing of traffic is possible because SpotLight replaces a carrier’s existing antennas with a software-defined phased-array antenna that is made up of 12 30-degree antenna beams mounted on three 120-degree panels. Carriers then can re-orient the sectors so that more than one sector handles the traffic that previously was overloading one sector.
The company said SpotLight can increase the capacity of CDMA cell sites by as much as 40 percent.
The system also allows carriers to configure different CDMA and analog sector patterns with the same antenna array to provide for dual-mode operation.
Metawave markets the product as a cost-effective way for carriers to increase CDMA capacity without having to upgrade their entire network to another carrier frequency. The SpotLight 2000 overlays on a carrier’s existing equipment to allow it to increase capacity at the specific sites where usage is highest to delay an investment in an overall upgrade until it is needed throughout the network.
Metawave plans to increase its product line to include a smart antenna product for Global System for Mobile communications networks.
The company also recently announced it created a new customer operations organization to support technical support services, including system installation, optimization, project management and training.
The organization, which includes 45 field engineers, network engineers, project managers and technical service personnel, was formed as a result of increasing sales and deployment of the SpotLight system, which is operational in 10 domestic and international cellular networks through more than 50 SpotLight systems.
