LONDON-Motorola Inc. said it recorded speeds of 2.9 megabits per second during outdoor High Speed Downlink Packet Access trials with five major European operators.
Motorola did not name the carriers.
The technology, which is expected to launch in the second half of 2005, is designed to help operators design networks to offer reliable third-generation wireless data services with a variety of traffic levels, service demand, devices and locations. Applications in the trial included wireless e-mail, video streaming, music downloads and Web browsing, and the manufacturer said it is still looking for areas where performance can be enhanced.
“Pivotal to the commercial success of HSDPA is the expected performance compared to UMTS and ensuring that the correct expectations are set,” said Raghu Rau, corporate vice president for marketing for Motorola’s networks business. “To this end, Motorola is enabling the operators to emulate loaded networks.”
Rau said the new technology will effectively be three to 10 times faster than current UMTS networks, with the differential decreasing as the cell size gets smaller.
Operators worldwide are scrambling to increase network speeds and efficiency in wireless data to shore up sagging voice revenues. Last week, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo Inc. announced a 26-company consortium to develop standards for a “Super 3G” technology that would offer data transmissions at 10 times the speed of today’s 3G networks.
