Mercury Communications Ltd has long been talking about extending its local loop network by line-of-sight radio to avoid the expense of digging up thousands of surburban roads to lay cable (CI No 2,301), and finally, the talking has stopped and the action is beginning. It said originally that it was looking at four systems and might end up using different ones in different places, but for its first trial, it has settled on the Actran system from L M Ericsson Telefon AB. Mercury says Actran is based on a new point-to-multipoint radio in the local loop access technique claimed to enable faster implementation of integrated mixed service communications. It supports the public switched telephone network, Centrex, ISDN and PABX connections and leased data lines in multiples of 64Kbps. More than 10,000 subscribers can be connected per radio cell, and Mercury is using the system in the 10GHz band. The trial will run for three months with 22 businesses in Reading, UK.
