HSPA Cat 8 in Practice

Almost exactly 2 years ago, I've first seen a demonstration of a cat Cat 7/8 HSDPA device and went away very impressed after seeing downlink speeds of 4.2 MBit/s. Now I've finally gotten my hands on one myself and tested it in Vodafone's network in Germany. On the 6th floor of a building, the base station pretty close by (I assume) and my download speeds easily exceeded 5 MBit/s (= 700 kbyte/s) consistently over several days and at different times of the day. Wow, that's twice as fast as my ADSL line. But that's not the end of the line, a few operators have already rolled out HSPA+ with 21 MBit/s. Examples are Mobilkom Austria in Vienna and Telstra in Australia.

Comments

[Stefan Constantinescu]

What's the latency like? I remember you saying about HSPA+ making things more snappy.

[mobilesociety]

Hi Stefan,

Concerning latency, have a look here:

http://mobilesociety.typepad.com/mobile_life/2009/10/the-hsupa-rtd-delight.h tml

Cheers,
Martin

[Bruce Fitzsimons - Mr Watson Come Here]

Add Telecom New Zealand and Vodafone NZ to that 21Mbps list, field testing already with launch in weeks (November) for Telecom and "next year" for Vodafone.

The devices are reputedly hard to get hold of though, and of course no actual phones.

[Arun Demeure]

All the HSPA+ devices are based on the Qualcomm MSM8200 at this point, Bruce. Icera's has 14.4Mbps out now though (iCon 505 for example) and 21Mbps soon, and I assume ST-Ericsson's M540 will eventually be available in real products too. None of these are really viable for phones; there you'll have to wait for the various 45/40nm chips, of which the first might just be Icera's.