3G speed to hit 28Mbit/sec next year

February 21, 2007

Data rates of 28Mbit/s could be available on 3G mobile phones as early as next year if the industry adopts a plan to upgrade existing HSDPA and HSUPA technology. The high speed technology known as HSPA+ will be introduced before next generation 3G LTE technology, which is due in 2010.

"The next evolution is HSPA+ which increases data to 28Mbit/s," Luis Pineda, senior v-p marketing and product management at Qualcomm, told Electronics Weekly. "There are capacity benefits for the operator and it's a simple channel card upgrade."

HSPA+ is part of the 3GPP Release 7 standard and Pineda said the timeframe for services is 2008 and there is already a lot of support for the technology from carriers, including Cingular in the US.

Freescale Semiconductor is looking at HSPA+, but Mike Philips, director of strategic marketing at Freescale, believes its prospects are uncertain.

"It'll depend on how quickly 3G LTE [long term evolution] comes in," said Philips. "If it's fast then operators will skip HSPA+ and go straight to 3G LTE, but if it's delayed then they'll probably deploy HSPA+."

Bristol-based Icera's next chip, due later this year, will be upgradeable to HSPA+ in software, according to Nigel Toon, v-p marketing.

HSPA+ uses multiple antennas for transmit and receive (MIMO), and uses 64QAM coding for the downlink and 16QAM for the uplink.

"HSPA+ could be an upgrade deployment path for operators as it adds the MIMO diversity and higher speed, particularly in femtocells," said Rupert Baines, v-p marketing for PicoChip. "But LTE has stopped being an evolution and it's now a 4G network, it's totally different."