"The past decade has been a period of unprecedented expansion in the wireless telecommunications industry. In the years since the introduction of 2G services, mobile voice and data access has rapidly evolved from a costly luxury enjoyed by a privileged few to a ubiquitous necessity that readily crosses demographic boundaries.

Today, the effects of increased frequency allocation and provider competition have manifest themselves in a wireless market where soaring licensing and infrastructure costs routinely clash with the realities of an especially challenging commercial environment. Characterized by powerful downward price pressures and consistently high levels of subscriber churn, the mobile telecom arena has become a progressively more unlikely place from which heavily mortgaged network providers can extract reasonable returns on their investment.

Thus, across much of the industry, tomorrow's advanced third-generation applications are now viewed as a means by which current commercial impediments can be overcome. Through the proliferation of robust 3G capabilities, providers see compelling new opportunities to break the competitive stalemate, while substantially growing operating margins with newly forged services.

Unfortunately, however, the implementation of next-generation capabilities has not yet proven itself to be the magic bullet that many were anticipating. This is especially true in urbanized regions, where extremely complex signal propagation environments exist alongside rapidly escalating subscriber densities. Instead of becoming an instant source of revenue expansion, these highly important markets have unveiled substantial technological gaps that now threaten the long-term viability of fully enabled 3G networks.

At the root, this technology deficit is a fundamental inability to adequately control the wireless signal environment, also known as the Air Interface Medium. This is due to the fact that contemporary medium control capabilities still employ underlying technologies that are decades old, and predate even the first cellular telephony systems. Thus, they are wholly inadequate is dealing with next-generation network architectures, which demand a level of precision exponentially higher than that of their predecessors. Without a considerable improvement in Air Interface Medium control capabilities, tomorrow's networks will be unable to meet newly broadened expectations of reliability, subscriber capacity, and application bandwidth."

:: from Novatics CEO John A. Dooley's comments in Wireless Business and Technology.

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