Tatarstan is to get the world’s most advanced telephone system under a $48m contract with Germantown, Maryland-based Hughes Network Systems Inc announced on Friday. The Republic of Tatarstan is part of the Russian Federation, and the system will be installed in eight major cities, with switchover scheduled for next year. The GMH 2000R advanced digital cellular system uses the E-TDMA Extended-Time Division Multiple Access system and digital speech interpolation techniques to boost capacity and quality while keeping costs down, the subsidiary of General Motors Corp’s Hughes Aircraft Co said. It will be the first large-scale residential wireless telephone system in the world, and users will get phones that transmit conversation to central reception towers, which in turn will relay the calls through a switching system to communications satellites. A digital speech compression system developed by Hughes fills the natural gaps in conversations with bursts of other conversations, enabling a 15-fold increase in the volume of speech on a given channel. And a Hughes rooftop multisubscriber unit installed in apartment buildings will multiplex signals from all the telecommunications equipment in in the buildings for wireless transmission to the rest of the system. Switches produced by Alcatel NV’s Alcatel SEL AG will provide the interfaces between the new wireless network and the Russian ground system. The company is looking for an additional $300m to $600m of revenue from Tatarstan alone according to Dow Jones & Co, and hopes that the pioneer implementation will give it the lead in winning thousands of millions of dollars of work upgrading obsolete communications systems throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States, China and other developing countries. It got the Tatarstan contract by teaming with the ubiquitous San Francisco-Moscow Teleport Inc, a small New York consulting company that has fixed several long-distance service contracts elsewhere in Russia.
