High Speed Packet Access (HSPA)

NTT DoCoMo has announced that it will launch the world’s first combined HSDPA/LTE femtocells in December 2012, to enable improved indoor coverage for both 3G and 4G mobile handsets. Shops and offices will be able to offer high quality 3G and 4G coverage and users will be able to drop back to slower HSDPA services… 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

Now that LTE deployment is increasing, significant differences are emerging in the marketing approaches being followed by mobile network operators. At one extreme, Vodafone Germany is targeting LTE at competing with fixed broadband services. LTE provides mobile network operators with the ability to support significantly higher usage than possible with HSPA networks, by reducing the… Read more

As part of its announcement of the launch of its LTE network, SK Telecom in South Korea provided information on mobile data traffic, which is continuing to increase substantially. SK Telecom said that monthly data traffic recorded in June 2011 was 19 times greater than in August 2010. It predicts that the “dramatic” increase in… Read more

In his wireless blog, Alastair Brydon reviews early examples of LTE pricing, in Denmark, Germany and Sweden. Now that a number of European LTE services have been launched, I’ve reviewed the early pricing models being adopted in three countries. The table below shows the current LTE pricing charged by Telia (Denmark), Telia (Sweden) and Vodafone… 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