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Europe may have destroyed hope of seeing 3G phones, by greed

"There's no way back." The problems facing mobile operators because of the huge up-front costs of building their networks may turn out to be fatal, according to a company which is trying to sell infrastructure equipment to them.

The company, Unisphere, believes that it has a range of equipment which could rescue 3G licence holders from a huge problem facing them two years down the line, when the 3G standards switch from version 4 to version 5 of the 3G protocols.

"But deployment has been massively delayed, at the very least, by the huge upfront licence costs charged in most European countries," said Wim van Campen, technical marketing director of Unisphere in Europe. "The fact is that there is almost nothing that 3G can do that can't be done by installing wireless LAN equipment everywhere."

The problem facing the 3G operators, says van Campen, is that the current method of switching calls depends on Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) protocols. In two years, when version 5 of the 3G standard is adopted, ATM will give way to the Internet Protocol (IP)

"This is the hot area of 3G networks," said Van Campen, talking to the Newswireless; "if you believe, as I do, that we have no choice but to make 3G networks work. The specifications as they are today, in version 4, are all ATM based for voice and data; which calls for buying an ATM switch. In two years, 3G v5 which is IP based, will be out. At that point, a mobile operator is facing the problem of having to tear all the ATM stuff out."

"There is no way back, however," said van Campen. "It may be the case that the upfront licence costs are wrong, as I think they are. But it can't be fixed; if they did adjust the licence fees, there would be people who would say: "But we'd have bid if the costs were in that range."

The product which he believes may save them, is the MRX family of routers - the Multiservice Edge Router, as Unisphere calls it. It has the ability to convert packets from ATM to IP "at wire speed," and can be reconfigured, in two years time, to use the prevalent protocols, again, without slowing down transmission or delaying packets of data.

"To do that, you have to be smart and fast. We think everything should be wire-speed. If you have gigabit ethernet, you have to be able to send data without interruption, even if you're getting the smallest packets. And 64 bytes is the smallest packet; so no matter how many you send, I've got to forward them without queueing or dropping packets. And it has to be done at wirespeed."

If a switch gets a burst of data, and it isn't running at wire speed, the switch has to drop packets, or queue them. "Say that packet 18 is a voice packet, voice over IP. It has a high priority; so if I queue it, any contract specifying quality of service is history. If I drop it, the voice call breaks up. So it has to be wire-speed routing all the time," said van Campen. "We measure latency in the router, the ERX (in nanoseconds)."

Naturally, facing heavy competition from large and well-established rivals like Cisco and Juniper - often described as "the IP Mafia" with Unisphere in the Asian markets - van Campen is not eager to downplay the importance of his unique products in the market.

He appears to be counting on the awareness of the big operators that time is limited; that they can't wait indefinitely before launching 3G if it is to be a success. Potentially, 3G technology has a huge advantage over "amateur" wireless sites using WiFi or Bluetooth or other licence-exempt networks; it has the capability to support far more users in a small area. But it needs to have large numbers of users, quickly, to be commercially viable.