ISCO International, LLC, a leading provider of flexible spectrum conditioning solutions for wireless service providers, today announced Proteus, a new product that “clears the air” of radio interference that infringes upon users trying to connect to a base station for voice or data service. PurePass, the new all digital technology in Proteus, passes an RF signal free of unwanted co-channel and adjacent RF power that comes from a variety of sources such as adjacent wireless operators, wi-fi transmitters and random, unpredictable sources such as: CATV equipment, bi-directional amplifiers, cross-border transmissions and even baby monitors. This ensures the cleanest signal with the smallest guard bands is passed to the base station even in the most difficult environments, such as dense urban, special events, coastal and border areas.
"The use of Digital Signal Processing to actively monitor, groom and condition the uplink signal will substantially reduce the amount of spectrum wasted to guard bands, ingress from adjacent RF power and co-channel interference," said Gordon Reichard Jr., CEO of ISCO International. "Spectrum can instead be used to permit more carriers, more calls, and greater data throughput. In addition, Proteus can help our customers balance capital spending between their new 4G networks and the need to support, maintain and operate their existing 3G networks through maximum utilization of their existing spectrum.”
As they convert to 4G, wireless operators have the challenge of squeezing more traffic into their limited 3G spectrum. They will need to operate and grow 3G capacity for at least the next three years to support continuing voice traffic, overflow data traffic from 4G, coverage gaps and legacy customers.
ISCO’s new Proteus product enables more capacity to be squeezed from existing 3G spectrum and infrastructure, allowing more capital to be allocated for next generation network deployments.
The Proteus platform supports CDMA, UMTS, HSUPA and HSPA+. ISCO’s new PurePass RF Digital Signal Processing operates so fast that interference due to co-channel frequency-hopped GSM can be removed from CDMA or UMTS carriers. The company plans to formally introduce a 4G version later in 2011.
Proteus offers three unique capabilities designed to eliminate service-degrading physical layer impairments: User-Defined Band Rejection, Carrier Select Conditioning and Adaptive Interference Mitigation (AIM), which are based on ISCO’s proprietary PurePass technology. User Defined Band Rejection allows the operator to reject specific unwanted RF power that exists either in-band or in an adjacent band. Carrier Select Conditioning enables the operator to define the specific carriers in use and only pass that RF power to the base station, delivering enhanced adjacent channel selectivity. PurePass AIM proactively identifies co-channel interference and removes its RF power before being received by the radio channel cards, resulting in optimal reverse link performance.
The analysis software tool SpectrumView™ can be purchased separately to gain visibility into the condition of the spectrum that Proteus is conditioning. SpectrumView provides spectral data including information pertaining to specific interference and a general status of the environment.
Proteus has been successfully tested by major wireless operators located in the U.S. and Europe. A white paper describing Proteus and methods to achieve maximum spectrum utilization is available on the ISCO International website: www.iscointl.com.