Trend in the Trunking Market
Over the past few years, global trunking technologies and services have gradually broken the narrow bounds of traditional private networks. Many successful Public Access Mobile Radio (PAMR) network operators have emerged, guiding the development of the technologies towards higher-level applications. Under the new trunking operation modes, more cost-effective, convenient and professional trunking service applications are provided to more fleet and enterprise users.
Recent years have seen the rapid growth up of China-developed digital trunking technologies led by ZTE's Global Open Trunking Architecture (GoTa). ZTE has not only launched a new-generation digital trunking product that has an independent intellectual property right, but has also explored a successful business mode through conducting technical and commercial trials with Chinese operators.
GoTa is now the only Chinese digital trunking product that finds widespread commercial applications in the global market. The introduction of GoTa marks the first time that a Chinese vendor, as a standard-setter, takes the lead in the new-round reform of the global trunking communications market.
GoTa Technologies and Products
ZTE's self-developed GoTa is the world's first CDMA-based professional digital trunking technology, and it is one of the three strategic product lines of ZTE. Since starting key trunking technology research and high level design in 2002, the company has invested a total of over 1 billion RMB on GoTa products. Continuous high investments ensure constant technical innovations, serialization in systems, terminals and service, and enhancement of product quality and functions.
ZTE owns over 100 GoTa-related patents for CDMA-based core technologies and extended services. As a CDMA-based technology, GoTa offers significant advantages over traditional trunking technologies: it can meet the application requirements of both private and public trunking network applications; it can capitalize on the combination of trunking service and value-added services to attract large amounts of users to access the network. The GoTa system and terminals have a low cost, meeting the requirements of large-scale network deployments and greatly lowering the threshold of professional trunking service applications. Therefore, GoTa is a cutting-edge digital trunking technology that has high competitiveness and a huge market potential.
In the past year, ZTE has made great technical breakthroughs in GoTa technology and product development. ZTE solved the key techniques in delivering group call service that allows a group to have unlimited number of members to be served by a single sector. This function meets the requirements of professional trunking technologies and radio dispatch in various application scenarios. After further performance optimization, the GoTa trunking call setup time has been shortened to less than one second. Recent applications in professional environments (such as Tianjin Port) have proven that GoTa can fully satisfy the dispatch requirements of professional trunking users.
Moreover, the quality stability of trunking terminals has been greatly improved. Upon release of the G612, a new intercom handset, it has won full recognition from many professional customers such as the Tianjin Port and the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Committee. In the future, ZTE will continue to make improvements on the system connection time and terminal serialization.
Market Applications
In terms of market applications, ZTE's GoTa undoubtedly takes the lead among the Chinese digital trunking technologies.
In the international market, ZTE has implemented commercial GoTa systems in countries including Russia, Malaysia, Norway, Benin, Ghana, Gabon, Sri Lanka, Mongolia, Vietnam and Haiti. Moreover, ZTE deployed GoTa trials in countries like Portugal, the United States, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Egypt, Tunis, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Nigeria.
In May 2005, ZTE unveiled the GoTa commercial network built for the Norwegian operator, NMT, and held a CDMA Global Demo in Oslo.
In 2006, Electcoms, the biggest PAMR network operator in Malaysia, started to build its national GoTa network to replace the existing analogue trunking system. The network was launched in January 2007.
In 2006, ZTE entered the North American market by setting up a GoTa trial network with Sprint Nextel. Now, ZTE and Sprint Nextel are cooperating on the applications of CDMA trunking technologies.
In November 2006, ZTE won the national security network project of Ghana. The project was to provide professional radio dispatch services for government departments of Ghana, like the national security department, police, fire control, army, customs and hospitals. On March 2, 2007, the first phase of the project was completed and immediately put into service at the Ghana Independence Day celebration.
In March 2007, at the opening ceremony of "the Year of China" in Russia, China and Russia signed a series of strategic cooperation agreements, including the GoTa industrialization cooperation. At present, a GoTa-based government security network is being implemented in Russia.
The overseas market breakthroughs made by GoTa fully demonstrate ZTE's technical strengths, and that the company has accumulated rich commercial application experiences.
In China, ZTE worked with China Tietong and China Satcom to deploy the GoTa trial networks in early 2003. So far, the GoTa commercial trial networks have been deployed in five of the six cities approved by the MII, namely Changchun, Shenyang, Tianjin, Jinan and Nanjing.
Industry Chain and Standardization
In addition to the technologies and market applications, the survivability of digital trunking will be decided, in the long run, by the establishment of a healthy industrial ecology that can propel the sound development of the digital trunking industry.
While promoting global applications of GoTa technology, ZTE is making great efforts to propel the development of the GoTa ecology, which will cover various aspects of the market such as equipment manufacturers, industry application solution providers, content and service providers, and network operators.
With respect to GoTa system industrialization, ZTE has entered into a technical cooperation agreement with systems equipment manufacturers such as Nortel and Qualcomm to develop Open Standards and Interface Specifications, jointly building the industry chain alliance for interoperable communications systems equipment. In 2006, ZTE signed a GoTa technology license agreement with NMT. According to the agreement, the two companies will use GoTa as the only trunking technology to promote the GoTa network construction and applications in the pan-Northern European areas.
In terms of GoTa terminal industrialization, ZTE has developed its own GoTa terminal series. It also cooperates with many terminal manufacturers like Youthnet, Asiainfo, Besta, and SEG Communications, to diversify the terminal supply, as well as to provide terminal serials, including ordinary trunking handsets, special handsets with waterproof, shockproof and dustproof features, and vehicle-mounted stations.
In December 2004, the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) released the General Technical Requirements on CDMA-based Digital Trunking System. GoTa is the only digital trunking product that complies with this national standard. So far, ZTE has edited all standards and specifications for GoTa that include ZTE-patented GoTa technologies. The company began to cooperate with carriers in Russia, Malaysia and Northern Europe on the local standardization of GoTa technology. ZTE is going to set up a global GoTa forum, with members including Chinese and international operators, as well as vendors with authorized use of IPR for GoTa, to push forward the internationalization of the GoTa standard.
The growing GoTa ecology is giving birth to a new global mainstream standard of digital trunking technology. For equipment manufacturers and operators, even for the whole communications industry, the time for the industrialization of digital trunking technologies has come. The worldwide launch of ZTE's GoTa trunking system has great significance in improving the status of Chinese communication equipment vendors in the world; it marks the competition between Chinese communication equipment manufacturers and their overseas counterparts has moved up from product to standard.
