War Of Words Heats Up In Battle Of Cordless Telephones
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday December 3, 1990
WHEN cheap, lightweight, cordless phones finally make their appearance in the deregulated Australian telecommunications market in a year or so, most users will expect them to receive calls as well as make them.
But there is some confusion about the types of cordless technology we may eventually get, and whether the one likely to dominate in Australia will allow handsets to receive incoming calls in certain situations.
It's easy to get confused, for two reasons.
One, users will have to distinguish between CT-2 (Cordless Telephone 2), which, by the time it is up and running, will be an improved version of the castrated British CT-2 - and CT-3. The second is seen as the precursor to the DECT (Digital European Cordless Telephone) standard, which ought to become the first true PCN (Personal Communication Network). There is also CT-2 Plus, which seems to be an umbrella term for various enhanced versions of CT-2 that resemble CT-3 in some respects.
Secondly, because communications company Ericsson, which sells the CT-3 system, is telling everyone that the older CT-2 will not allow incoming calls when a user moves within range of telepoints (public base stations which communicate by radio with the handsets and link into the public switched phone network). Its own CT-3 can. According to Ericsson, while a CT-2 can make calls near a public telepoint, it can receive them only if it is logged on to its main base-station at home or the office.
This is a major slight on CT-2.
One must point out that Ericsson's CT-3 is highly unlikely to become the dominant system here since the company - should it get an Australian licence from Austel to provide the service - is not aiming its cordless phones at the public access market, where people would make calls near telepoints scattered in choice locations around the city.
Ericsson is targeting the office market, inside buildings, where its CT-3 can replace hard-wired phones with mobile ones. The only reason CT-3 is not being considered for public access is that Ericsson believes there is no money there.
Thus, despite being called limited, CT-2 looks like becoming the standard for public cordless telephony in Australia because it is the system that everyone else, such as Telecom, British Telecom in Australia, OTC, and others who may get a licence from Austel, will offer.
But supporters of CT-2 vigorously deny that CT-2 cannot be made to receive incoming calls when near public telepoints. They say this is a myth.
Albert Sommer, manager strategy for Telecom Mobile, who evaluates emerging technologies and their market development, and who is overseeing Telecom's planned CT-2 service, said that CT-2 suffered from the British experience, where the regulatory authorities took the extraordinary decision to bar CT-2 systems from receiving incoming calls in order to keep the technology simple and costs down.
"It was not a technological limitation," Sommer pointed out.
Possibly because of this, and the scarcity of base-stations and competition from cheap cellular phones, CT-2 has failed miserably in Britain. Its four service providers number only a few thousand subscribers between them, and British Telecom's Phonepoint service has taken to offering free holidays in the US to any new subscribers.
But the betting is that CT-2 will soon be relaunched in Britain, and incorporate full two-way public telepoint calling.
And by the time CT-2 is introduced in Australia, says Sommer, that capability will be already incorporated into it.
But how? The CT-3 people say this is not practical.
Sommer says there are two ways of doing it, neither particularly technically difficult.
One is to incorporate pagers into the handsets. "You get a pager beep and that will tell the number that is calling you. In the early days (of this system) that number will store in memory. You get near a telepoint and you make the call to that number."
In a more advanced version, when a user gets a pager call when near a telepoint, he or she simply hits a button, and the call is quickly put through to the handset by the telepoint.
But the method more likely to be adopted in Australia, according to Sommer, involves building more intelligence into the CT-2 network by setting up a network management centre, a kind of giant PABX switchboard which communicates with the telepoints.
With this system, a CT-2 user decides to receive calls, so when within range of a telepoint, he or she hits a button and lets the telepoint know he or she is there. The telepoint communicates the user's location to the network management centre, which then routes any incoming calls to that telepoint, which then contacts the handset.
This settles the two-way argument. But it nevertheless highlights CT-2's limitations when compared with the more technically advanced CT-3. A CT-3 handset would automatically alert the telepoint of its presence without the user having to log-on first. The same principle is used by cellular phones.
Sommer argued that building this capacity into CT-2 would make the technology more complicated, and too expensive.
Kevin Phillips, national network manager for Telecom Mobile, pointed out that CT-2 telepoints are relatively simple affairs.
Adding a network management centre would complicate the technology enough, he said.
Ericsson admits that its CT-3 handsets will cost more than CT-2 handsets, but points to features that CT-2 will not have, such as handover - the smooth rerouting of a call from one base-station cell to another as the user moves around; and far higher call capacity for the same amount of spectrum.
The company believes that once its CT-3 is widely adopted in offices, its cost will come down and it may begin to compete directly with CT-2 in the public access area.
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald
