US : Lucent Technologies introduced a new compact, cost-effective base station to enhance its market-leading portfolio of third-generation (3G) CDMA2000 base stations.

China Unicom is one of the first customers to receive shipments of the Flexent® Modular Cell 4.0 Compact, a high capacity base station with a small footprint and the newest addition to Lucent's Bell Labs-developed OneBTS® family of base stations.

China Unicom is deploying the new base station as part of its phase III expansion, in which Lucent is supplying CDMA2000 equipment to increase the coverage and capacity of the operator's network in six provinces.

The 4.0 Compact is an ideal solution for mobile operators with networks that require a base station that takes up less real estate or physical space. Its size and flexibility make it suitable for urban environments, and it can be scaled down to fill in network coverage gaps, increase capacity in high-traffic areas such as airports or sports arenas, extend coverage inside buildings, or provide service in less-populated regions.

"This product is designed to meet a variety of customer needs, and the capacity it provides in about a four-foot tall frame is particularly attractive to mobile operators," said Mary Chan, vice president of research and development for Lucent's Mobility Solutions Group. "The 4.0 Compact also offers our customers significant time-to-market advantages and operational savings because many of its components -- including radios, amplifiers and more -- are common to other base stations in Lucent's portfolio."

The 4.0 Compact works in a wide variety of environments. It can be deployed in a closet, basement or rooftop. It also can work with distributed antenna systems (DAS), which are frequently used when wireless systems are deployed in a building, and can support passive (rely on power from the base station) or active (self-powered) DAS systems.

The 4.0 Compact's high carrier density - the amount of capacity or voice or data calls that can be supported in a product "footprint" - is the result of one of the many technical and design achievements implemented by Bell Labs researchers and developers. The product also supports multiple power configurations and spectrum bands.

Lucent Worldwide Services (LWS) will provide a comprehensive portfolio of services to support the 4.0 Compact. These include Professional Services, such as network design and optimization, and program management; Deployment Services; and Maintenance and Operations Services. These end-to-end services are particularly important to mobile operators that deploy the product inside of a building because a building's layout, architecture, location, number of inhabitants, and many other variables have an impact on the RF (radio frequency) or signal requirements of the mobile network. In addition, LWS also will support unique DAS hardware for optimum deployment.

The 4.0 Compact is available in both indoor and outdoor versions and can support cdmaOne(tm) and CDMA2000 1X voice and data in 1900 and 850 MHz spectrum. It also will support CDMA2000 1xEV-DO in the future. With minimal modifications, it also can be built to support other radio frequencies at a customer's request.

Built using Lucent's OneBTS® digital base station platform for 3G spread-spectrum technologies, much of the 4.0 Compact's hardware is common to Lucent's 3G UMTS/W-CDMA base stations.

Lucent will showcase the 4.0 Compact in its booth (#S2) at the upcoming 3G World Congress 2003 tradeshow taking place in Bangkok, Thailand, Nov. 3-7. It also will be exhibited in Lucent's booth (#8C01) at the PT/Wireless & Networks COMM China 2003 tradeshow taking place in Beijing, Nov. 12-16.

Lucent's Mobility Solutions Group is a leading global provider of mobile networking technologies, having deployed more than 80,000 spread-spectrum base stations for mobile operators worldwide, of which 40,000 are already supporting 3G services.