FRANCE TELECOM AND NORTEL TO BEGIN TESTING UMTS NETWORK.

• Position: Company Business and Marketing

France Tlcom and the Canadian manufacturer Nortel announced on June 9 that they were to begin laying an experimental third generation mobile telephony network (UMTS), permitting rapid Internet access. France Tlcom mobiles plans to test innovative multimedia services using prototype mobile telephones. These devices include handsets using W-CDMA technology (wide band CDMA, the European UMTS standard) and PCMCIA cards capable of transmitting data at a rate of about 64 kilobytes per second. A prototype with a maximum output of 384 kilobytes will also be tested. The equipment, the data network and the terminals used in the context of these trials will be supplied by Nortel Networks and Panasonic (Matsushita group). France Tlcom aims to divide by ten the cost of the transmission of a megabit of data via a mobile network within five years. UMTS, the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System, represents the next generation of mobile phones...