Product category:
Communications ICs (Wireless)
News Release from: Broadcom Corp
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 16 February 2006
Novel mobile technology boosts network
quality
Announced at 3GSM in Barcelona, Broadcom MStream is a new mobile phone technology that provides significant quality and capacity improvements for 2G and 3G cellular networks.
Announced at 3GSM in Barcelona, Broadcom MStream is a new mobile phone technology that provides significant quality and capacity improvements for 2G and 3G cellular networks After extensive testing, handsets equipped with Broadcom's MStream technology demonstrated improved voice quality in weak and noisy signal conditions where call quality was typically poor
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 19 Oct 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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Leading handset manufacturers and cellular operators are currently evaluating MStream technology to increase voice quality, coverage and data integrity in low signal areas, as well as to increase capacity on existing cellular networks.
When the growth in number of cellular handset users outpaces the growth in network capacity, carriers typically convert their cellular service to lower bit-rate operations, which support more users per basestation but unfortunately can suffer noticeable voice quality degradation.
In addition, low-bitrate class of service results in a higher number of dropped calls, which negatively affects customer satisfaction.
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Cellular carriers will benefit from technologies that enable increases in capacity and improved call quality, which are important requirements to avoid service cancellations or costly customer support.
Broadcom's cellular baseband processors, enabled with MStream technology can allow networks to support nearly twice as many calls as before without any changes to the current network infrastructure.
"With MStream, Broadcom introduces a breakthrough technology that sets our cellular product offerings apart from the competition and builds on our track record of superior technical innovation", said Dr Henry Samueli, Chairman, cofounder and Chief Technical Officer of Broadcom.
"This new technology is a win-win for consumers and carriers, improving the basic voice quality of mobile phone calls that are often taken for granted, while increasing cellular network capacity with no additional investment required by the carriers".
All the components in Broadcom's family of new baseband processors are enabled with MStream technology, providing benefits from entry 2G GPRS handsets to leading-edge 3G WCDMA/Edge feature phones.
Cellphone users who experience weak signal reception are often faced with garbled or choppy voice connections, making it difficult to carry on a conversation.
MStream technology dynamically employs advanced error correction algorithms to the incoming voice or data streams, and reconstructs lost information to restore reception quality.
MStream technology is based on Broadcom's proprietary signal enhancement algorithms developed for mobile phones, enabling handsets to operate on standard GSM or WCDMA networks with significant improvements in demodulated speech quality in poor signal conditions and noticeable improvements in voice clarity.
MStream technology provides a 2 to 3dB typical signal/noise improvement over a very wide range of channel conditions, including weak signals, fading and in areas where radio interference is present.
Using the industry standard PESQ (perceptive evaluation of speech quality) method of scoring voice quality, MStream improves voice intelligibility in bad channel conditions by 0.5-1 unit on the PESQ, where PESQ's quality scale ranges from -1 to 4.5 points.
These enhancements provide a direct benefit to consumers by improving call quality while allowing carriers to increase the number of callers who can be supported on existing networks.
MStream technology is complementary with 3GPP specified downlink advanced receiver performance (DARP), which is also referred to as single antenna interference cancellation (SAIC).
DARP is an industry standard technique for mitigating high cochannel interference in mobile phones.
Broadcom implements DARP together with MStream, and the combination provides a 4 to 6dB signal/noise improvement under typical GSM network conditions.
This improvement enables carriers to significantly increase their coverage and overall network capacity due to decreased downlink power requirements.
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