networkZONE Products for the week of July 21, 2003
Agere Says…
Why Not WiFi? -- Agere Systems' Integrated Chip Set
Pairs Wi-Fi And VoIP Technologies For Low-Power, Wireless IP Phones
Agreement between Agere and NTT-ME Corp. enables development
of wireless phones capable of operating over NTT's residential and enterprise
broadband VoIP service
Agere Systems will soon be producing a new chip set that leverages its
expertise in two leading technologies to enable low-cost, mobile phone calls
over the Internet. Agere's wireless VoIP phone solution integrates its industry-leading
WaveLAN wireless networking and proven voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP)
technology onto a single platform.
In addition, Agere has signed an agreement with NTT-ME Corp., a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corp., to incorporate NTT's Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) software into Agere's wireless IP phone solution. As a result, Agere plans to offer a development platform and reference design for handset manufacturers that will enable phones to be built that are interoperable with residential and enterprise broadband VoIP networks deployed by NTT, Japan's largest broadband service provider.
Wi-Fi(tm)/802.11 technology allows users to access the Internet and wirelessly transmit data through network access points. VoIP technology enables converged voice and data connections on phone networks, eliminating the need for separate data and voice cabling, while increasing network efficiency and reducing per-call costs. By combining these two technologies into a single, integrated chip set, Agere's solution will support communications devices that give users the freedom to roam across corporate networks, residential broadband networks and public Wi-Fi hotspots. Industry analyst firm, In-Stat MDR, expects worldwide shipments of voice over wireless LAN handsets to grow from 90,000 units in 2002 to more than 1 million units by 2007.
Agere's plan to support NTT-ME's UPnP software development kit, is an important step to enable manufacturers to provide low-cost handsets that are capable of communicating over NTT's residential and enterprise VoIP broadband services.
"As one of the world's largest communications providers, NTT is committed to addressing the growing demand for residential broadband and VoIP services," said Tetsuya Kanada, vice president of NTT-ME's broadband business. "Our collaboration with Agere, who is a leader in Wi-Fi and VoIP chips, will help make low-cost, wireless IP telephony more accessible to the millions of customers who have come to rely on broadband services in Japan."
Agere's chip set is designed to meet the compact form-factor and low-power consumption requirements of today's handheld mobile devices. The solution offers performance benefits that will significantly improve the talk and standby times of wireless IP phones currently available on the market.
"This platform demonstrates the technological breadth and expertise Agere provides customers looking to address the growing demand for wireless VoIP phones for residential and enterprise communications," said Stan Swearingen, vice president of computing connectivity at Agere. "By offering solutions that are interoperable with broadband services being deployed by leading providers, such as NTT, we can provide unprecedented product development and time-to-market advantages to handset manufacturers."
Agere's wireless VoIP solution consists of the following components:
As part of its wireless IP phone chip set solution, Agere also will supply
software drivers for the uClinux operating systems, the session initiation
protocol (SIP) stack, voice compression codecs, and sample demonstration
applications.
analogZONE Says . . .
With the release of their WiFi VoIP solution, Agere has delivered one of the first commercially-viable chip sets that will at least make a dent in lots of the interoperability and cost issues that have prevented widespread deployment of the technology until now. 802.11/WiFi holds promise in all sorts of applications, including the 802.11-based handsets demo-ed at conferences for the past couple of years. While they have made some inroads into high-end enterprise PBX systems, there are several factors that have kept these handy little devices from becoming ubiquitous parts of our daily lives.
While the relative immaturity of VoIP has become much less of a problem in the past year, the technology has still struggled to define a subset of protocols, and service models that would be practical for most applications. And then there was price. The early handsets relied on cobbling together a WiFi radio a non-optimized VoIP processing chip, and a general-purpose RISC engine to handle protocols and management functions. Besides the extra space and power demands, such first-gen systems were not cheap.
Agere's four-chip solution addresses these issues rather well by yoking its previously-announced WiFi chip set (reviewed here) with a one-chip VoIP call controller/voice processor (one chip) and an "analog glue" chip. I got a nice tour of the chip set's guts from Bill Bullman, the Technical Manager for VoIP products. I really appreciated Agere putting a technical person on the phone without having to twist arms (a rare thing these days), and tried to make the most of his expertise.
Bill explained that the T8307 controller/voice processor includes one of Agere's venerable 16000-series DSP cores, and an ARM 946 RISC engine -- something that allows a single chip to do all of the heavy lifting associated with VoIP compression, echo cancellation, and protocol stacks. It communicates with WiFi transceiver via a glueless memory-mapped interface. The ARM and RISC cores communicate between each other via dual-port memory, something that makes for very efficient real-time interactions and conserves main bus bandwidth at the same time. The DSP has its own on-chip ROM and memory, but the RISC core requires external Flash and SRAM to complement its on-chip caches. The DSP comes with a ROM-resident library of functions including standard codecs, echo cancellers (handset side), sidetone and DTMF generators.
To the best of my (limited) knowledge, the only other company with such a nicely-integrated solution is TI, with its OMAP DSP/RISC platform.
One of the truly unique things about the Agere solution is its CSP2200 analog chip that integrates all the power management, ring control, battery charge audio codecs, and other and miscellaneous analog functions. The CSP2200 even has seven LDO regulators -- some of which are adjustable by software. They take care of making all necessary voltages to run memories, displays and I/O on a battery-powered device. While most serve specific tasks defined by the reference design, some of the LDOs can be used by a designer for whatever other task they have in mind. This well-designed analog chip is the primary reason that their reference design provides 4 hrs of talk and 60 hrs standby with a standard 1000-mAh battery, significantly more than competitors using (bigger, more expensive) 14,000 mA batteries.
This aggregation of functions in the CSP2200, and the cost/space savings it yields, is very analogous to what started happening in cellular chip sets as they matured a half-dozen or more years ago. This, and the rather extensive software platform provided by Agere will help jump-start one or more WiFi voice markets. The current software load includes a "universal plug-and-play" solution developed by NTT for residential apps in Japan. It's extensive, and powerful, and you can get most of the salient details from the manufacturer's "blurbage" (above my comments).
Agere's teaming with NTT on this solution is smart, since most of the early high-volume applications (especially in residential markets) will come from Japan and greater Asia, where broadband carriers are booming, and actively pursuing all sorts of VoIP/SIP-based telephony schemes. Agere says that this product is aimed initially at Enterprise markets, but I expect that they will be moving quickly to consumer/residential markets and, perhaps, even the ill-defined hot spot services that everyone is talking about.
The $30 (sample) price for the chip set will help manufacturers drive down the cost of handsets, which are currently being sold in enterprise solutions for $500 - $600. I'll hazard a guess that the first products will list in the $200-$250 range, but start to plummet as volume increases. It will take a while for pricing to approach the consumer threshold of around $200-$250 (á là the early Siemens Gigaset products) for a complete base station/handset solution, but this may not be a factor as most VoIP applications will be installed and subsidized by service providers.
While most of the first deployments will probably happen in Asia, I think that wireless VoIP will quickly prove itself an excellent revenue adder for the handful of domestic (North American) broadband carriers that have their provisioning and QoS issues under control. I expect we'll also see the technology changing things in Africa and other currently-underserved regions. For example, a good friend of mine is using this strategy to add telephony services to the WiFi-based broadband delivery system he's deploying in several major Ecuadorian cities. It will allow him to bypass the prehistoric POTS and compete effectively with the cellular systems that still enjoy monopoly-like pricing throughout most Latin-American countries. Hmmm, maybe I should tell Ed about this chip set…
I'm still a bit unsure about how the "hot spot" market will play out in North America, and too ignorant of how the Asian market works to declare a home-run here yet. Nevertheless, Agere is to be complimented on how well this new product dovetails with its existing product offerings, making it possible for designers to create cost-effective end-to-end VoIP/SIP solutions.
Sample quantities of Agere's wireless IP telephony chip set and development platform will be available in September, with volume production expected in the first quarter 2004. Unit pricing for complete chipsets will begin at $30 in sample quantities.
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