12:00 by
Tung Tram
, under
HSPA
While it puts the finishing touches on its
nascent 7.2Mbps upgrades and starts certifying devices to use it, AT&T has revealed a juicy tidbit: that's probably the end of the line for old-guard HSPA on the country's largest GSM network. Before
LTE, though, AT&T plans on upgrading to HSPA+ which should bring 21Mbps speeds out of the gate; straight-up HSPA is theoretically capable of moving to 14.4Mbps, but AT&T says that it's had technical difficulties in maxing it out and HSPA+ equipment is now ready for implementation anyhow. Simultaneously, the company says it's adding additional carriers at cells on a case-by-case basis to help with white-hot demand and is upgrading its backhaul network to handle the blazing speeds promised by the newer standards. We'll see.
[Via
Phone Scoop]
And here we were envious of the 21Mbps HSPA+ service currently offered by Telstra in Australia. Now we hear that Ericsson will be demonstrating its 56Mbps HSPA multi-carrier MIMO technology at CTIA (using a router, not handset) later this week with scheduled deployment set for 2010. By the end of 2009, Ericsson claims that it will support 42Mbps commercial deployments. All this assumes that carriers hold steady with HSPA and don't jump straight to LTE or WiMax... ok, LTE.
The Aussies are
laughing all the way to 21Mbps, sure, but where's a denizen of the Old World supposed to get their fix? Austria's mobilkom has officially become the first European carrier to launch HSPA+ service, using Ericsson-sourced equipment to offer peak data rates up to the same 21Mbps offered by
Telstra. What's more, Ericsson says they'll hit 28Mbps "in the course of the year," so the only challenge left on the table is getting a whole bunch of devices that can take advantage -- USB sticks and ExpressCards are a forgone conclusion, sure, but where are our blazing handsets with five-minute battery lives?
[Via
SlashPhone]
by
Chris Ziegler, posted Mar 26th 2009 at 5:41AM
