Talk about blazing trails: Ericsson has taken its uber-fast HSPA+ gear commercial in Telstra’s network in Australia, which is now capable of delivering the head-spinning speed of 21mbps — a three-fold improvement over the industry standard speed to date. One slight hitch: You can’t really use it.
That’s because there are no devices yet to support those kinds of speeds, though Telstra’s working on the issue. The carrier is pow-wowing with Sierra Wireless, Qualcomm and Ericsson to develop compatible devices, it said in October.
The network-device disconnect is not a new phenomenon. Evolved HSPA, or HSPA+ as it’s known, is the next big thing, but existing HSPA networks — essentially an upgrade from GSM-based UMTS networks — are pretty fast, too. To date, regular HSPA is capable of delivering a 14mbps peak download speed. But meanwhile, devices only have supported a 7.2 mbps peak.
Even if users have to wait to reap the benefits, the milestone points out the continuing snowballing of the HSPA phenomenon. Though much has been made of 4G all-IP mobile broadband like LTE and WiMAX, vendors are continuing to improve HSPA because the economics of doing so simply make sense, given the worldwide install base for GSM. It’s simply an easier sell to get operators to sign on for an HSPA upgrade than a network overbuild to move to a 4G technology like LTE or WiMAX right now, because HSPA+ upgrades are software-based affairs.
“With a simple software switch we can go up to 21mbps,” said Arun Bhikshesvaran, CTO for North America at Ericsson. “Literally, from a software load, we can upgrade a whole city overnight from a remote center. We put that kind of forethought into the product. The capital efficiency for carriers is immense.”
For operators, the faster speeds have been proven to translate to more revenue. Telstra, for instance, first moved to regular HSPA from a 2G CDMA network last year, and the evolution has increased its average revenue per user by $20, it said. In 18 months, the number of customers using the faster network had risen more than 40 percent, and those customers spend 45 percent more than those on its basic 2G service.
“The future holds simply streams with no uploads or downloads, just like electricity, which just flows,” predicted Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo, in a keynote back in June at NXTComm.
Of course, seeing the same improvements with HSPA+ will come down to the aforementioned devices. There are glimmers of hope: Bhikshesvaran told xchange that Ericsson is expecting to see faster embedded HSPA laptops from the likes of Lenovo and Toshiba in the near future.
“We see a very interesting trend where they’re starting to embrace this,” he said.
