Multimedia-bearing throughput for cellular networks
With more than 100 million users, 3G is well established but already the industry is racing ahead with the planning of the next generation of mobile multimedia communications functionality, which promises great things.
With more than half the people on the planet owning a mobile phone, mobile voice communications are virtually ubiquitous. The last few years have seen a rising demand for mobile data services which deliver the same performance to users as broadband to the desktop would do.
W-CDMA, the 3G technology, was supposed to deliver this capability but unfortunately the data speeds available with 3G fell well short of expectations. The fix was HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), which can deliver data at speeds of up to 14.4Mbps to a mobile phone. HSDPA has been welcomed by mobile operators who have rushed to deploy the technology and there are now 165 networks with HSDPA capability.
Unusually for the mobile industry, HSDPA handset availability almost kept up with network deployment and there are a growing range of HSDPA-enabled handsets available in the market. Although early deployments only delivered 3.6Mbps throughput, this was quickly pushed up to 7.2Mbps and some networks are now claiming to be able to provide the full download speed of 14.4Mbps.
