Hughes Network Systems Inc. and national operator SPT Telecom have installed a fixed wireless network in The Czech Republic capital city of Prague.
The Hughes GMH 2000 will employ Extended Time Division Multiple Access technology and use seven cell sites throughout the city. The system, operated by SPT, initially will serve 6,000 subscribers in Prague. Plans call for the network to be expanded republicwide and ultimately serve up to 50,000 subscribers, HNS said. Customers will use single-subscriber fixed wireless phones.
Affordable, mass-market telecom service is essential to accelerate economic growth, said Pradman Kaul, HNS president and chief executive officer. “Digital wireless technology is enabling entire regions of the globe to leapfrog traditional wireline technologies,” Kaul said. Fixed wireless allows developing countries, such as former Eastern Bloc nations, to bypass outdated landline systems and enter the world of digital wireless, HNS said.
The Czech Republic-created two years ago when Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia-has a population near 10.4 million, with approximately 1 telephone per 3.2 people.
The country’s analog Nordic Mobile Telephone-450 phone service is operated by Eurotel Prague of the Bureau Central Radiophonique. It went online in 1991 and reportedly has 12,300 subscribers.
Hughes said significant capital and operating cost savings can be achieved by deploying such a fixed wireless loop service as an alternative to cable loops. Using HNS-developed E-TDMA technology, call-carrying capacity is increased more than 15 times compared with analog wireless systems and generally more than eight times more than other digital wireless systems, HNS said.
The spectral efficiency translates into the fewest number of cell sites, the least amount of radio equipment, and therefore the lowest costs, the company said.
Michal Cupa, director of planning and development for SPT, said the system was implemented quickly. “The chief advantages to the people of Prague include mass market affordability and speed of implementation. No other system we investigated offered comparable value,” Cupa said.
E-TDMA is an extension of Interim Standard-54 TDMA, using digital speech interpolation with a superior half-rate voice coder to achieve significant gains in quality, capacity and cost, HNS said.
The Czech contract has been valued initially at $12 million, with expansion estimated to reach $70 million.
HNS, a division of Hughes Electronics Corp., also is implementing fixed and mobile wireless phone networks in Jakarta, Indonesia, Chengdu in the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Republic of Tatarstan.
