14 DAY TRIAL // Broadcom Corporation announced that its M-Stream technology has successfully completed live network trials in North America. Testing in Baltimore and Seattle demonstrated that handsets equipped with Broadcom M-Stream technology exhibited significant improvements in voice quality, improving Mean Opinion Scores ratings by 0.5 in areas of low signal and interference, and increased network capacity without additional modifications or cost to the network itself.
When growth in the number of cellular handset users outpaces the growth in network capacity, carriers typically convert their cellular service to lower bit-rate operations, to support more users per basestation. Unfortunately, this often causes users to suffer noticeable degradation in voice quality. In addition, a low bit-rate class of service results in a higher number of dropped calls, which negatively affects customer satisfaction. Cellular carriers will benefit from technologies that enable enhanced capacity and improved call quality, which are important requirements to avoid service cancellations or costly customer support. Broadcom's cellular baseband processors with M-Stream technology enable networks to support nearly twice as many calls with improved quality using existing cellular network infrastructure. M-Stream technology is a software-based technology that does not add additional hardware to either the cellular baseband processor or handset.
Broadcom M-Stream technology dynamically employs advanced error correction algorithms to the incoming voice streams and reconstructs lost information to restore reception quality. It also typically provides a 2 to 3 dB signal/noise improvement in GSM networks, over a very wide range of channel conditions that includes weak and fading signals, and in areas where radio interference is present. These enhancements provide a direct benefit to consumers by improving call quality while enabling carriers to increase the number of callers who can be supported on existing networks. On 3G-UMTS networks, operators can gain up to 20% more network capacity by deploying handsets enabled with M-Stream technology.