HSDPA is now operational in the USA, South Korea, France, Bahrain, the UK and Australia, currently supporting downloading at up to 3.6Mb/s, with improvements to 10-14Mb/s in the near future
The high transfer speeds HSDPA offers are possible thanks to the addition of a special W-CDMA channel, known as the High-Speed Downlink Shared Channel (HS-DSCH), to the 3G specifications.
As a result CDMA operators are now migrating to GSM/WCDMA and several laptop manufacturers are now selling machines with an embedded module or HSDPA chipset built right in.
HSDPA-enabled PCMCIA data cards enable the functionality to be easily added to products with a PC Card slot.
Therefore HSDPA is fulfilling a similar role to Mobile Wimax (IEEE 802.16e), especially for those common applications that would not actually benefit from the slightly higher download rate that Mobile WiMAX can potentially deliver.
Various applications for HSDPA.
HSDPA is not only about data rates.
For certain time-critical applications, the reduction in latency, meaning a shorter round trip time, is the key selling point.
It opens the field for interactive, multiplayer, multimedia gaming without compromising on the pace of the action.
Mobile gaming is about to leap to the next level on the back of this technology.
HSDPA goes further.
What comes after 3.5G? 3.75G of course.
This will introduce High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) which is a protocol that will provide extremely high upload speeds of up to 5.76Mb/s, complementing the great downlink rate of HSDPA.
HSDPA testing by SGS.
SGS Wireless laboratories are engaged in testing the new HSDPA-enabled terminals for the GCF and PTCRB certification programmes.
