Expand coverage. Reduce interference. Increase capacity. Enable higher bandwidth.
These are the four corners of Conductus Inc.’s philosophy in rolling out its ClearSite solutions for first-, second- and next-generation air-interface standards.
To bring these lofty dreams to fruition, the company has produced the ClearSite 2100 systems and advanced new filters for 3G and PCS applications.
The demons the company said its solutions will combat include bit error rates, frame error rates, dropped and blocked calls, mounting customer complaints and high subscriber churn rates.
“The new ClearSite 2100 systems incorporate multiple manufacturing and fabrication process improvements, resulting in higher manufacturing capacity for both omni and sectored systems,” said Jim Simmons, Conductus’ vice president of sales and marketing. “They offer standardized filter packaging, which allows most filters required for carriers worldwide to be developed more rapidly.”
According to Conductus, the ClearSite solution survived a field test, showing increased cell site minutes of use and revenues increases from 30 percent to more than 50 percent for first- and second-generation networks.
“In a recent 3G field trial with KDDI and Hitachi,” said the company in a statement, “Conductus’ ClearSite system provided significant improvements in coverage, bandwidth, handset power and bit error rate, all of which can be drastically degraded due to existing sources of interference in Japan.”
The product, says Simmons, offers remote variable gain options for both omni and sectored systems and can be electronically adjusted through a modem or PC without occupying more rack space, eliminating the need for technicians to drive for hours to reach cell sites.
The systems also feature lower noise solutions to expand outdoor and in-building coverage and a new controller board, including a new higher speed processor with more memory, said Conductus.
“We are announcing filters for three of the six specific PCS bands and all three IMT-2000 bands,” said Simmons. “With the increase of PCS subscribers, PCS networks are beginning to experience interference problems that cellular carriers have had for years.”
CDMA technologies may need these systems the most, said Simmons. “Many industry experts expect CDMA networks to be the most interference-prone among the digital protocols,” he said.
The company says CDMA 2G performed at 98 percent of total capacity and 3G is expected to operate at the same rate with the ClearSite systems installed by attenuating interferers and reducing system noise figures.
The company, founded in 1987 and based in Sunnyvale, Calif., serves Alltel Corp., AT&T Wireless Services Inc., Cingular, Dobson, Sprint PCS and Verizon Wireless in the United States as customers. In Japan it targets NTT DoCoMo, KDDI and J-Phone.
It also targets L.M. Ericsson, Lucent Technologies Inc., Motorola Inc., Nokia Corp. and Nortel Networks as OEMs.
