There is so much focus on the emerging 4G-style technologies, WiMAX and LTE, that it is easy to forget that most advanced carriers are more concerned, in 2008-9, with deploying HSPA, to improve the data services and efficiency of their UMTS networks. Arch-rivals Qualcomm and Texas Instruments were both showing off new products for the latest evolution of HSPA at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the latter one of the first fruits of TI’s 2007 expanded alliance with Ericsson Mobile Platforms. With Ericsson, in particular, putting new fire under HSPA+ (also known as Release 7 or HSPA Evolution) in parallel to the evolution of LTE, we are seeing a pattern similar to that in the 2G/3G transition, where the GSM system proved, via EDGE, to have far greater staying power than expected, even when next generation networks were entering the mainstream.

 

With the future of its own next generation wireless platform, Ultra Mobile Broadband, in severe doubt, Qualcomm is stepping up its efforts to carve out a leading position for the HSPA and LTE markets. It has consistently stolen a march on most competitors in HSDPA cards and devices and is now working with new partners – four major cellcos plus China’s Huawei – on the next iterations of the technology. The chipmaker is testing HSPA+ with a heavily European focus, working with Hutchison 3G, Telecom Italia and Telefonica, plus Australia’s Telstra, which is facing an aggressive challenge from disruptive operators equipped with WiMAX. With the huge investment that European cellcos have made in UMTS, LTE represents a doubled-edged sword, in that its accelerated progress to market is squeezing the window in which to make a return on 3G investment. Many carriers will look to minimize the negative impact of this by adopting a parallel strategy – continuing to enhance the UMTS networks for many years to gain greater efficiency and bandwidth, at improving price points, while deploying LTE for specific user groups or applications where true mobile broadband is required and can deliver competitive edge and/or improved ARPU and profit.

 

HSPA+, therefore, will be deployed in a similar timeframe to LTE, and in Europe in particular, will be the basis of the advanced wide area network, while LTE or WiMAX remain, for at least five years and likely more, technologies for selected metrozones and enterprises, and with the focus on nomadic and very advanced multimedia services rather than generic mobile internet usage. In many cases, build-out of LTE or WiMAX will need to be justified by a proven service that genuinely requires their capabilities and can deliver profit. Some are looking to television in 3G or TDD spectrum to be that app. HSPA+ build-out will be more easily justified in terms of improving general mobile data and internet access on truly wide area basis, filling in the gaps between LTE zones in the same way that EDGE has done so effectively – where regulators have allowed – for some UMTS carriers, allowing them to offer a level of data services ubiquitously without the prohibitive  cost of equipping even sparsely populated areas with 3G.

 

HSPA+ promises up to 28Mbps of performance and, of course, it is backwards compatible with existing UMTS/HSDPA systems, though new handsets are required. HSPA+ gains its performance benefits mainly from using MIMO and 64QAM modulation. "HSPA+ provides a highly efficient path for network operators to provide next generation wireless services with their existing networks," said Qualcomm's Steve Mollenkopf, senior VP of product management, in a statement. "With trials this year, we are on track for commercialization in 2009."

 

In fact, Telstra plans to introduce commercial HSPA+ services in selected markets by the end of this year. The trialists will use Qualcomm's MDM8200 chipset, which supports 64QAM HSDPA for 21Mbps downlink data rates and 2x2 downlink MIMO for 28Mbps downlink data rates.

 

For LTE, Qualcomm has fleshed out its roadmap and promised multimode chipsets for CDMA/LTE and UMTS/LTE in 2009. While the decision of Verizon Wireless, the world’s most important CDMA operator, to adopt LTE for its next generation - in harmony with joint venture partner Vodafone – was quite likely a deathknell for UMB, it does create a market need for CDMA-to-LTE migration and coexistence solutions. It will be vital for the CDMA chip and equipment vendors to move quickly to take the lead in this sector, in order to retain their key customers and prevent the one sector of the operator community that has been closed to Ericsson (since it quit CDMA) from falling into the hands of the Swedish market leader. Qualcomm will undoubtedly be aggressive in ramping up its development of the underlying technologies to support such an effort, even as it faces a challenge from vendors majoring on WiMAX, which now see the CDMA base as fair game in the race to ‘4G’.

 

Qualcomm's MDM9xxx LTE chipset family will initially contain three models, supporting various standards including UMTS, HSPA+, EV-DO Rev B, and potentially UMB. It has expanded both its device and base station chipset roadmaps to include LTE.

The chipsets will support FDD and TDD duplex modes and will be capable of supporting peak data rates of up to 50Mbps on the downlink and 25Mbps on the uplink.

 

Also, Qualcomm and Huawei are working together on an advanced receiver technology for HSPA, which they say will boost uplink performance by up to 60%. The technology features Qualcomm’s uplink interference cancellation feature to achieve the improvement.

 

Huawei and the chipmaker have become increasingly close in the UMTS/HSPA field and

have cooperated on several technology sharing and development efforts, including VoIP interoperability tests in Shanghai that used an all-IP end-to-end service based on commercial chipsets and IMS.

 

Over at Ericsson, the company was showing off new HSPA and LTE enhancements at base station and device ends. The company introduced a flat panel, compact, modulare base station that is designed to ease the task of running 3G and 4G networks in parallel, and moving between the two. The modular design will allow LTE to be slotted into an HSPA system as the need arises.

 

Like Qualcomm, Ericsson had enlisted operator support in the shape of Telstra, which claims the world’s largest UMTS network, and CEO Sol Trujillo(formerly head of Orange) said that deploying a UMTS/HSDPA network has enabled Telstra to offer more TV and video applications, which have been the most important growth application in Australia, and that about 15% of its 3G subscriber base also use a separate 3G PC card for laptop data access. The operator is keen to extract more performance and revenue out of HSPA before moving to LTE and Trujillo said: "We're going to 21Mbps late in 2008 and 42Mbps in 2009 through HSPA evolution." Telstra is in the happy position of having 850MHz spectrum, with its strong propagation qualities, for HSPA, whereas many European operators will have to wait until the LTE stage to refarm their GSM frequencies.

 

At the client end, Ericsson’s Mobile Platforms unit launched an HSPA multimedia handset reference platform based on Texas Instruments’ OMAP application processor and Ericsson’s HSPA modem, which will support all the key mobile operating systems. The U380 will be available in the first half of next year and offers a single-chip design, the first to emerge from the two companies’ OpenOS collaboration. The design is intended to reduce time to market for handset makers by carrying out extensive testing and verification in advance. Last week, Ericsson introduced the U500 HSPA multimedia platform, which combines three ARM microprocessors and a multimedia subsystem.

 

In another related move, the company said it would partner with China’s Lenovo to embed HSPA in the PC makers ThinkPad notebooks, a move that shows Ericsson joining the race to make the 3G modem, rather than Wi-Fi/WiMAX, dominant in the notebook as well as the handset, so keeping Intel’s influence in mobility strictly under control. Qualcomm, of course, has a similar objective with its Gobi software defined radio, which Dell and others are using to embed UMTS/HSPA into laptops.

 

Telstra may have stolen the thunder in Barcelona around HSPA, but Vodafone lent the most significant endorsement of the technology’s ability to evolve even alongside LTE. The world’s largest 3G operator put out strong statements that it saw HSPA+ as “a key technology to head the mobile broadband race”, and committed to trial the platform this year, working with Ericsson, Huawei and Qualcomm. This project, said Vodafone, will

help to establish whether HSPA+ is capable of delivering data throughput rates of up to 28.8Mbps, compared to the 14.4Mbps maximum of today’s HSPA networks.
 

“These trials will help us to ascertain whether HSPA+ voice and data capacity enhancements will be able to leverage existing UMTS assets, including radio spectrum, to prolong the lifespan of current UMTS networks still further,” said Steve Pusey, Vodafone's Global CTO, in a statement. “It will complement the exploratory work we are carrying out into more long term next generation wireless technologies such as LTE.”