Nokia has announced that it is now shipping EDGE network infrastructure to all major markets in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

EDGE, a so-called 2.75G standard, offers data rates of around 450 Kbs and sits between GPRS and W-CDMA in the GSM evolution path. Nokia’s UltraSite base stations can support EDGE within the 800, 900, 1800 and 1900 Mhz bands and provide backwards compatibility with existing GSM/GPRS infrastructure. Certain operators, particularly in the US, are looking to EDGE as a way of delivering high speed data services within their existing spectrum allocations. Nokia’s support will provide a boost for the technology, reassuring operators that innovative handsets should become available for their networks.

“EDGE enjoys the proven benefits of GSM technology, such as openness, cost-efficiency through economies of scale and true global footprint and roaming, and will become an integral part of GSM/GPRS and W-CDMA terminals,” explains Jussi Ware, Vice President Marketing and Sales, Nokia Networks. “EDGE is a natural next step enhancement for all GSM/GPRS networks in boosting the performance of the existing data services as well as enabling a rich range of multimedia services, which is why mobile operators across the world are increasingly opting for EDGE.”

Insight

That Nokia bothered to issue a press release at all is worth reporting. Although it does not provide any details of network rollouts, this is a clear sign from Nokia that it expects there to be a reasonable demand for EDGE networks and that it will build EDGE support into its handsets.

EDGE has two key advantages which might attract operators – it is backwards compatible with GPRS/GSM and it can be operated over existing GSM spectrum allocations. Although it will not be as inexpensive or seamless as the move from CDMA IS-95 to CDMA2000 1x, EDGE will not be plagued with the incompatibilities which have seen NTT DoCoMo’s W-CDMA users confined to certain coverage areas. Its maximum speed, 473 Kbs, should be sufficient for all but the most demanding 3G applications.