It wasn’t so long ago that we were all telling ourselves that with a 3G handset we would be able to access the internet and do anything that a wired connection could. With the arrival of HSDPA ‘ high speed downlink packet access ‘ that began to become sort of true. As we get to faster and faster speeds, it will be completely true. HSDPA creates a single shared outward data channel at the base station.
Now Qualcomm, at its annual analyst briefing conference in San Diego, has demonstrated an extension to that technology HSPA+, with a phone connection working at 20 Mbps in a single 5 MHz radio channel.
Qualcomm, so long considered the evil empire in cellular, heaping huge royalty fees due to basic communication breakthroughs on both chip designs and handsets, has taken the HSDPA chip market by the throat during the past 2 years, as almost all of the cellular operators in the Western World have upgraded to at least the 3.6 Mbps version of HSDPA and many are ready for the next step.
The settlement between Nokia and Qualcomm over royalty payments, entered into just a few weeks ago, is still reverberating around the cellular industry. It means that Qualcomm can finally offer chips to Nokia, and Nokia will no longer have much reason to limit its handset chip purchases to its favorite Texas Instruments, and its recent additions of Broadcom, ST Micro and Infineon.
In the rest of the handset market Qualcomm has taken more than a 50% market share in HSDPA chips, but in the Nokia world, which now comprises 41% of the world’s shipped handsets, all those HSxPA baseband products and SoCs (system on a chip) chips are set to come from with ST Micro, in the process of merging its wireless operations with NXP (the now independent Philips chip company). But Nokia may find that these new chips from Qualcomm are irresistible over the near term, and could dump its European partner in order to get this new capability quickly, for its wireless internet ambitions.
Traditionally Qualcomm had stayed in its own world of CDMA 2000, a completely separate cellular system design used in the US and parts of Asia, and not seen at all in Europe. As this has lost out to W-CDMA, the protocol that 3G is based on, around the world, this most aggressive US cellular chip maker has had to adjust its plans, and invade the W-CDMA 3G chip market. Since then Qualcomm has managed to reach each layer of HSDPA design ahead of its rivals, and now it looks to go beyond HSDPA to the new layer recently introduced between HSDPA and the next generation LTE technology. Other chips companies are unlikely to reach this point quickly.
This means handsets or PC dongles will be able to share a broadband connection of 20 Mbps with other customers in the same sector of a base station’s reach. In many cases today that means the full speed of 20 Mbps. Right now almost all the products on the market share a 3.6 or 7.2 Mbps data line, so it’s something of a breakthrough.
This move will also mean that companies that adopt the Qualcomm MDM8200 chip when it is ready, will be able to use VoIP for voice (Internet Protocol Voice), changing the economics of how voice is sent around the cellular network.
‘Today’s call represents another milestone for Qualcomm in the evolution of the HSPA road map,’ said Alex Katouzian, vice president of product management, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. ‘End users will enjoy quicker connections to the Internet with HSPA+ while network operators will appreciate the opportunity to offer more services to their subscribers.’
The latest evolution of W-CDMA technology, HSPA+ Release 7, will offer downlink data transfer rates of up to 28 Mbps and uplink rates of up to 11 Mbps. Future HSPA+ releases are expected to support downlink peak rates of 42-84 Mbps and uplink peak rates of 23 Mbps by using a variety of advanced techniques, including multiple carriers for transferring data.
The Qualcomm chip is currently sampling to customers and supports deployments in existing frequency bands, as well as in the 900 MHz band and the 2.5 GHz IMT-2000 extension band. So virtually any European network could next year offer devices with this blazing speed.