HSPA clocks up 245 networks and 122m users

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HSPA clocks up 245 networks and 122m users

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 15 July, 2009

READ MORE: Europe | Greece | Vodafone | Telstra Corporation | HSDPA

Despite the excitement about LTE, HSPA remains the workhorse for the 3G cellcos' expansion, as highlighted by the latest research from Wireless Intelligence. This found that there were 245 HSPA networks in commercial service worldwide in May 2009, while a further 113 were being deployed, trialled or planned.

Most active networks (over 70%) are still delivering only the 3.6Mbps peak download rate, the lowest end of the HSPA performance range, and most of the rest use 7.2Mbps, while a few carriers are introducing the 14.4Mbps peak iteration this year, and a handful, such as Vodafone Greece and Telstra, are starting to roll out 21Mbps HSPA+ (3GPP Release 7, which uses higher modulation schemes, mainly 64QAM). Further improvements in performance will require hardware upgrades, as HSPA+ of 28Mbps and beyond relies on MIMO and/or multiple carriers.

"Later this summer we will see the first commercial networks using MIMO supporting 28Mbps, and that will be followed quickly by the first networks supporting 42Mbps, using multicarrier as described in Release 8 of 3GPP," Ericsson's product manager Hans Beijner told telecoms.com. "Next year we will see further enhancements to HSPA, utilizing multicarrier with MIMO and 64QAM modulation, which enables bit rates of 84Mbps. This is part of Release 9 but further enhancements will come in Release 10 where it will be possible to use MIMO and 64QAM on four carriers, which will enable [peak] downlink bit rates of 168Mbps."

According to Wireless Intelligence, there were over 122m active HSPA connections worldwide in May and it predicts that this figure will rise to 149m by the end of this year, up from 59m at the end of 2008. It adds that there are now over 1,350 HSPA enabled devices on the market from 130 suppliers.