Beyond HSPA+: keeping up with the Joneses

A look at the evolution of HSPA+ through Release 11 and beyond

11/30/-0001 | 0 pages
Price: $795.00

The report begins by discussing many of the implications associated with a more advanced HSPA+ technology, including the timing and magnitude of LTE network rollouts and its subsequent impact on the vendor ecosystem, the impact on the user experience, and vendor market share. Next, the report analyzes many of the proposed features that are still being considered within 3GPP for HSPA+, the likelihood that they will be adopted, the timing of when they might be introduced, and their potential impact on network performance. These features include some well-advertised proposals, such as 8-carrier HSPA, 4×4 MIMO, CLTD (Closed Loop Transmit Diversity) and 2×2 MIMO in the uplink, as well as more arcane features, such as Multi-point HSDPA (MP-HSDPA), which can substantially improve user data rates at the edge of the cell/sector as well as meaningfully increase network throughput under certain conditions. Other proposed features can go a long ways toward reducing the burden of smartphone signaling and greatly reduce the call setup time before the data session commences. When all is said and done, we conclude that LTE still has certain advantages over HSPA+, namely lower latency and a more effective means of controlling interference in a heterogeneous network. It also doesn’t have to deal with potential performance issues associated with legacy devices when introducing new features. However, the widely-held belief that LTE is drastically superior to HSPA+ doesn’t hold true unless you erroneously compare the potential performance of a mature LTE/LTE-Advanced network with a non-optimized legacy HSPA network.