Filling the gaps with domestic technology | Bangkok Post: tech

REPEATERS FOR 3G NETWORKS

A Thai company is looking at providing home-grown equipment to fuel Thailand's imminent 3G network roll-out with repeaters to improve coverage to fill in the voids left when mobile operators overlay small 3G cells on their existing masts designed for large 2G footprints.

Anunda specialises in boosters, such as this 100-milliwatt 3G model for in-building coverage, all designed and made in Thailand.

David English, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Anunda Technology, explained how his organisation is unique in being a Thai company with a strong focus on research and development in the telecommunications sector, making and exporting repeaters for both 2 and 3G equipment.

Cellular base stations are expensive, at around $30,000 (926,000 baht) apiece for equipment and easily more than double that for the civil engineering work and back haul. A repeater takes a signal and pushes it to another area, perhaps extending the range of the cell site another five or six kilometres. Anunda makes 20-watt repeaters on 2100 and 850 3G frequencies and up to 60 watts on 2G. On the other extreme, its smallest pico repeater has a power of 100 milliwatts, enough for a 30-metre radius for in-building coverage.

Repeaters are used in sparsely populated areas which are limited by radio propagation reach, not a cell's data throughput capacity. This is very relevant in the 2G voice market, but perhaps less so in 3G where cellsites are limited by the bandwidth they can serve up.

The world is changing. Capacity constraints mean that going into the future, most base stations will be smaller and put closer to the customer. Anunda has no plans to create macro cells, but is looking at producing pico cells for buildings.

English noted that Anunda sources components from South Korea, Europe, the USA and Japan, but not from China. "When you have SLAs based on fail rates, you get penalised. My point is we focus on quality. We were performance-tested against some of the biggest companies in the world and we are right up there with them. In the past year and a half we were better than everyone else for our GSM FSR [frequency shifting repeater]," he said.

Anunda's founder and CTO, Dr Thongtod Vanisri, is a graduate in radio circuit design and is personally responsible for the overall design of the product and specifications.

Anunda sells its equipment locally and to China, Europe, the US and Japan. Eighty percent of sales are to local network operators. One problem from being in its unique position as a Thai success story is the red tape involved in getting export licences to sell overseas.

At the 3.9G Human DNA event, Anunda Technology was showcasing its new HSPA+ repeater. The need for increased capacity and speed marks a clear shift in the industry, which used to be be about voice coverage.

Meanwhile, English said that there will be a strong demand for 3G repeaters, despite the capacity constraints. This is because 3G cells are smaller and the incumbent telcos will struggle with coverage as their current 2G GSM masts will simply not mesh with the 3G footprint.

Going forward, English said Anunda's Thai team of 20 researchers is looking into MIMO capable repeaters and readying their designs for future LTE chipsets, though that market is still some way off.