Finnish telecom equipment major Nokia is talking to operators in India, including Reliance, for migrating them to the WCDMA technology.
Wideband Code Division Multiple Access is a variant of the GSM technology while Reliance offers services on both GSM and CDMA technology.
WCDMA is a technology for wideband digital radio communications of Internet, multimedia, video and other capacity-demanding applications. It provides higher capacity for voice and data.
"We are talking to operators in India, even Reliance for deployment of WCDMA technology," head of 3G WCDMA Networks at Nokia, Emilio Brambilla said.
He, however, did not say whether the talks are on for upgrading the GSM or CDMA networks of Reliance.
He said there was an end of the road for Code Division Multiple Access as no further evolution was possible in this technology after EVDO, whose data transfer rates are 2.4 megabits per second.
"In markets like Latin America and Korea, the operators are shifting from CDMA to WCDMA, which is an evolution of GSM technology. We are talking to operators in India, including Reliance, for migrating them to WCDMA," Brambilla said.
He said that 2004 was a turning point for 3G. As of June 30, 2005, there were 78 commercial WCDMA networks across 36 countries, amounting to a customer base of over 28.34 million WCDMA subscribers, a number that will go-up exponentially over the course of the next few years.
Closer home in Asia Pacific and China, Nokia is the leading supplier of WCDMA networks and has supplied 12 of the 22 networks.
Brambilla said the third generation mobile services based on the GSM technology are in for a further boom worldwide with the availability of the 3G compatible handsets at less than Rs 4,500 by the end of 2006.
"By the end of next year we will see the availability of 3G compatible handsets at less than $100 a piece," he said.
One of the major hurdles in the roll out of 3G networks is the high cost of handsets. Once they come down, the service providers will find it easy to migrate more people to the new technology. Further, Nokia is working to increase the speed of data transfer on WCDMA networks.
"At present rate of data transfer in 3G network is around 1.0 to 2.0 megabits per second and we are working on increasing it to anywhere between 10-100 megabits per second," said Tuomas Tormanen, Strategy Director Consumer and Market Operations, Nokia Networks.
Nokia is already at the forefront of research in high-speed packet access, a natural evolution to WCDMA 3G that brings higher data speeds with a simple software upgrade to Nokia's existing WCDMA 3G radio network.
He said that Nokia has already started working on 3.9G standard, open-standard specifications, which are expected by 2007.
