Evolved High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA+)

I am often asked for facts and figures on current wireless technologies such as Evolved High Speed Packet Access (HSPA+), Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced, so I thought it would be worth capturing some of these in this blog post. There have been dramatic advances in both HSPA+ and LTE since their first arrival… Read more

It doesn’t seem long ago that I remember looking across the Atlantic with pride as Europe forged ahead with the deployment of GSM systems, while the USA struggled to keep up with a disparate array of mobile network standards. Not anymore. Last week T-Mobile became the last of the four US national mobile operators to… Read more

Potential LTE new entrants may be buoyed by the success of EMOBILE in Japan. EMOBILE has demonstrated the viability of a new entrant pursuing a data-centric mobile strategy in a highly-competitive market. It has achieved a sizeable customer base and an attractive EBITDA margin in a relatively short period. New entrant EMOBILE is Japan’s latest… Read more

This year we will see both LTE and HSPA+ deployments becoming significant worldwide. LTE deployments are now gathering momentum although, as shown in the figure below, it is still early days with LTE. There have been 20 LTE networks commercially launched so far, in 14 countries. We expect more than 40 additional LTE commercial launches by… Read more

In March 2011, the GSA announced that 17 operators have already launched LTE services, including the USA, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Uzbekistan. It also announced that 140 operators were committed to deploying commercial LTE networks. In April 2011, the GSA reported that HSPA services have now been… Read more

In his wireless blog, Mark Heath of Unwired Insight discusses the latest LTE speeds reported by mobile network operators. Am I the only one that gets frustrated by all the hype surrounding LTE speeds and LTE performance? Many in the industry are seeing LTE as the means of avoiding the looming 3G capacity crisis, as… Read more

In order to provide high quality of service to their customers, 3G operators must have sufficient network capacity per user, or 3G device, to support our forecast traffic volumes per 3G device. Following the launch of 3G services by a 3G operator, the total available 3G network capacity has only to be shared among a… Read more

We have derived realistic figures for total network capacity per month and network capacity per month per 3G device for a number of operator circumstances, as shown in the table below. For each technology, the table shows the capacity figures that could be achieved by a typical network implementation if ALL 3G devices supported that… Read more

The ability of HSPA, HSPA+ and LTE to deliver high spectrum efficiency is dependent upon them being able to reach the instantaneous peak data rates from each technology. To achieve high overall average throughputs from a base station, the base station must be able to achieve the maximum data rate possible in excellent radio conditions.… Read more