The new "M*N MUX" transmitter is forecast to save US$50 million annually by optimizing channel selection The talk of the town these days in the world of information and telecommunications is HSDPA (High- Speed Downlink Packet Access) - a new mobile telephony protocol sometimes referred to as a 3.5G technology. In the midst of parties involved in developing the new technology, such as the Ministry of Information and Communication, mobile telecom operators and equipment manufacturers, beefing up efforts to commercialize HSDPA by the end of this year, KTF, the mobile telecom operator, recently announced it has developed a transmitter called M*N MUX that can save over 50 billion won annually in leasing costs when the technology will be introduced on the market. The reason for the cost saving, the company attributes, derives from the sharing of leased lines used in different base stations. In the case of KTF's wireless network, four different standards are employed, namely 2G, cdma2000 1x, 1xEV-DO, and WCDMA. By optimizing the use of different standards, the company said, it can minimize the number of leased lines in operation at a base station and allow the resultant spare lines for use in other base stations, too. President Cho Young-chu said that HSDPA, an asynchronous 3-G mobile technology, provides high level of mobile communication services including those for video phones, high-speed data transmissions and global roaming which had not been previously available. Nevertheless, concerns have been raised by mobile telecom operators that they have to incur the burden of operating the existent CDMA and WCDMA networks at the same time, and thus bear the burden of leasing lines at base stations. In order to build and operate a nationwide HSDPA network, a mobile operator needs to use leased lines. However, the company said that such costs needed to lease lines have acted as an enormous burden on mobile telecom operators to such an extent that leasing costs have reached 200 billion won annually. Park Sung-rae, manager for Access Network Development at KTF R&D Center, said, "Since transmission protocols and traffic traits used at base stations are different, there have been a lot of trials and errors in developing and testing the product. However, a trifling idea to clear up daily inconveniences turned out to be a great success." Currently, M*N MUX is on a trial operation at a WCDMA base station in Yongin in conjunction with other base stations for 2G, cdma2000 1x, and 1xEVDO for its nationwide service.