As we highlighted in the conference “The Commodity Basestation: When, How and Who Wins?” the wireless infrastructure industry is going through a period of significant change - how basestations are built, who builds them and even who buys them are all likely to change substantially over the next few years. The impacts of architecture “standards” such as OBSAI, CPRI and ATCA, the growing importance of picocells and microcells as 3G rollouts bias towards data coverage and the increasingly blurred boundaries between telecom and datacom as standards like 802.16d/e (WiMAX) emerge are all powerful and relatively new dynamics in a world market worth more than $10B annually. Any changes in a market of this size can mean big money, black or red.

So how will all this pan out? That's the theme we will follow closely through this newsletter - and dive into in depth at next years' Basestation Conference (April 26-29 2005). Each issue of this Basestation e-newsletter – initially every quarter – will provide a summary of the more significant product announcements and news items that illustrate wider industry trends. We will also feature articles from Analysts and Marketing and Technology leaders in the industry, which will provide more depth on the technical and commercial issues driving the industry evolution.

European and North American opinions on the evolution of the wireless infrastructure are driven by significantly different market situations. Cingular's recent requirement that its network suppliers should have a significant US presence - “Unless they are here, they don't understand this market. CDMA EV-DO is not in Europe .” – is one testimony of the differences. We aim to provide coverage of the technical and commercial issues in Europe and the US through industry analysts such as Jorgen Hjert in Sweden and Jim Gunn in the US . Hopefully we can create some useful cross-fertilisation of ideas. And we're working on our Asian connections too …

The next 12 months should prove a particularly fascinating period in the basestation business. At long last many UMTS networks are “going commercial” – here in the UK there have been a number of breathless reports of download speeds in excess of 300kbit coupled with comments along the lines of “shame it doesn't work so well indoors”. The whole issue of picocells and indoor coverage will hot up very rapidly – see Caroline Gabriel's article which includes intriguing possibilities of learning lessons from WiFi deployments to progress the UMTS “in building” business case.

Picocells and microcells are likely to be even more critical to the next stage in UMTS technology, HSDPA. Data rates are proving to be inversely proportional to cell size making widespread deployment of picocells and microcells a necessity if operators are going to be able to deliver the megabits the enthusiasts promise. HSDPA seems to be turning into the surprise “hit of the year” with operators scrambling to deploy as soon as practicable. HSDPA Handset silicon is well on the way from major suppliers such as Qualcomm and startups such as Zyray (now Broadcom) and Icera. DoCoMo is planning to start HSDPA service next year and Cingular is talking about HSDPA as part of its first UMTS deployment within the next 2 years. It is clear that heavyweight bets are being lined up for “3.5G” technology before 3G has shown any return on investment. Those who lived through the painful birth of “2.5G” GPRS will ponder on the reality of these timescales – have enough lessons been learned about the deployment of wireless data to make these dates achievable? We will be following these issues closely over the coming months.

The most obvious market for HSDPA services, at least initially, are the enterprise laptop users who demand megabit connection speeds. Intriguingly, this is the same market that WiMAX service providers will be targeting from 2005 onwards as commercial WiMAX equipment begins to emerge. How that particular battle pans out will provide compelling viewing over the next couple of years. And there is an “underdog” in this particular struggle that could yet deliver a few surprises - UMTS TDD from companies such as IPWireless has made quiet but steady progress in real world deployments. It can deliver megabits, it's already mobile, it has allocated spectrum in many countries and it even integrates with a UMTS core network. Could the “mobile megabit market” yet become a 3 horse race?

Have a good summer.

Pete.

Pete Keevill is managing director of Nextek Consulting and programme co-ordinator for the annual industry 'Basestation Conference'