Wireless personal communications in Hong Kong: a university perspective

the last decade, the telecommunications industry has experienced explosive growth in wireless technology. This growth, together with recent developments in hardware miniaturization, has opened a new dimension to future wireless networks whose ultimate goal is to provide ubiquitous and universal personal communications without regard to mobility or location [1, 2]. To achieve such an objective, the next-generation personal communications networks (PCNs) will need to be able to support a very high level of user traffic along with a wide range of high-quality services. The introduction of wireless communications to Hong Kong began in the mid-1980s, and it has now become very much a daily part of Hong Kong life. The penetration of paging services is among the highest in the world and currently exceeds 1.05 million customers served by over 30 operators. The paging market has grown almost sevenfold over the last ten years and has reached true mass market appeal. The penetration of mobile telephone services, although lower than in some Scandinavian countries, is higher than in many other developed countries. This includes 1,243,978 cellular subscribers as of January 1997, which represents a penetration of approximately 21 percent, and 907 Cordless Telephony 2 (CT-2) telepoint subscribers (down from 170,000 in December 1994). The current CT-2 and cellular services are in the 800/900 MHz bands for which specific technologies were approved during the issue of licenses. In CT-2 services, four operators have been licensed. Although CT-2 technology was not particularly successful in other countries, it has been successful in Hong Kong and is only now beginning to be phased out as low-cost cellular services reduce its popularity. In cellular services , five licenses have been awarded to four operators. One of the major problems facing cellular operators over the past two years has been providing sufficient capacity. To combat these problems, the Office of the Telecommunications Authority (OFTA) has licensed six operators for cellular-like " personal communications services (PCS) " and up to four operators for the upgraded CT2-like " cordless access services (CAS), " both in the 1.7–2.0 GHz bands. The licensing is technology neutral in that OFTA will not specify what technology is to be adopted. With the introduction of PCS, a total additional cellular capacity of 1.2 million subscribers is expected. One of the important questions facing Hong Kong operators is whether such a subscriber base can be expected in the next five years. Conservative market predictions …