On the economic aspects of base station sharing in cellular CDMA

Abstract

The success of wireless communication system during the last twenty years has been dramatic. Estimates have been continuously overridden by the enormous demand. Wireless multimedia systems (3G) are scheduled for deployment within the next few years to meet the challenge of "wideband on the move." A natural but critical question at hand is if we can provide wireless multimedia with a price of today"s telephony; or at least with reasonable price levels that subscribers are able to accept. Unfortunately, positive answers to this question seem to be unlikely to appear. The user demand on the bandwidth (data rate) is about to increase up to 10-200 times compared to that of current voice communications, but the spectrum allocation per channel for the service will be only doubled or tripled. Thus, a fast increase of infrastructure density is expected, which will in turn put a heavy burden on subscribers in the form of a high service price. To remedy this situation, there have been a number of efforts in the area of the technological aspects of wireless system. However, we believe that these solutions do not completely remove such an economic problem but just provide a partial solution. In this study, we tackle the problem from a different angle; our goal is to seek possibilities of reducing wireless service cost, by means of base station (BS) sharing, in particular among DS-CDMA operators. BS sharing implies the use of the same BS infrastructure to provide wireless services from more than one operator. From the user``s perspective, there is no significant difference, due to perfect roaming between BSs of different operators. BS sharing is different from the operators`` regional monopoly because an operator can get subscriptions in regions where there is no BS of its own. We believe our approach here will provide 3G operators with technological as well as economic insights. In particular, in countries like Korea where multiple operators are independently planning to ...