O2, Nortel demonstrate HSDPA wireless services

December 18, 2004

Nortel and mmO2 have successfully completed a series of live wireless calls using an emerging broadband technology - High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) - that can deliver dramatically faster and more sophisticated wireless services. O2 plans to deploy Nortel's solution across portions of its Pan-European wireless network.

Nortel and mmO2 recently completed live wireless test calls demonstrating the capability to offer DVD-quality film and video, high-resolution interactive gaming, multimedia music tracks, 'push-to-watch' services and access to large e-mail attachments - all at speeds three times faster than today's commercial 3G networks.

The test calls were completed as a first phase of planned Nortel deployments across portions of O2's European UMTS network.

"We are looking forward to deploying this broadband technology in Europe, and to delivering a newer and better experience to our business and consumer customers," said Dave Williams, group chief technology officer, mmO2. "Nortel is proving to us their aggressive schedule for delivering HSDPA, and this makes them a very attractive ally for deployments across our Pan-European footprint."

Commercial field trials of the Nortel HSDPA solution begin in the second quarter of 2005 and are expected to include an integrated, commercial data card product.

HSDPA is a migration technology for the UMTS wireless standard used by leading wireless operators across Europe, Japan and North America to deliver voice and data services. HSDPA boosts network capacity to carry up to three times as much data traffic and up to twice as many wireless users per cell site compared to today's UMTS networks. By making more efficient use of the existing network and boosting throughput, HSDPA significantly reduces operating costs while delivering a better end user experience.

In the test calls, a five-megabyte music file was downloaded in less than 15 seconds, compared to two minutes over a traditional dial-up connection A 45-megabyte MPEG video file was downloaded in about three minutes, compared to 15 minutes over dial-up. An e-mail with a five-megabyte attachment was downloaded in 20 seconds.

Nortel has been demonstrating live HSDPA calls using commercially-available products since June of this year at its Wireless Excellence Center in Chateaufort, France. Live calls were also demonstrated in October for O2, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Orange, Partner, Bouygues and a number of other leading operators at a Nortel customer event in Madrid, Spain. Nortel is also developing advanced technologies such as OFDM and MIMO that are expected to deliver even faster speeds and higher capacity to meet growing demand for data services.