ABI Research: To Paraphrase Yogi Berra, Upgrading to HSDPA is 90% Software and the Other Half is Hardware.OYSTER BAY Oyster Bay, uninc. area (1990 pop. 6,687) of the Town of Oyster Bay, Nassau co., SE N.Y., on N Long Island, on Long Island Sound; settled 1653. It is chiefly residential. , N.Y. -- The GSM world is looking to HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) See HSPA. to increase downlink cellular bandwidth, first because of the high data rates required to transfer advanced multimedia to the handset, and also because HSDPA reduces the cost/megabyte of transmission to less than half that of 3G WCDMA (Wideband CDMA) A 3G high-speed digital data service provided by cellular carriers that use the TDMA or GSM technology worldwide, including AT&T (formerly Cingular) and T-Mobile in the U.S. . There is one more reason, which is competitive: the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) A method for transmitting simultaneous signals over a shared portion of the spectrum. The foremost application of CDMA is the digital cellular phone technology from QUALCOMM that operates in the 800 MHz band and 1.9 GHz PCS band. world already offers close to 1Mbps through EV-DO (EVolution-Data Only) A 3G high-speed digital data service provided by cellular carriers worldwide that use the CDMA technology, including Verizon and Sprint in the U.S. EV-DO works on EV-DO cellphones as well as laptops and portable devices that have EV-DO modems. , and it could reach 3.1Mbps with the Rev A version. How easy will the upgrade to HSDPA be? The conventional wisdom is that it's just an easy software update. There is some truth to this: 3G infrastructure installed since 2002 was designed with HSDPA in mind and therefore will be software-upgradeable. But according to ABI Abi (ā`bī) [short for Abijah], in the Bible, King Hezekiah's mother. (Application Binary Interface) A specification for a specific hardware platform combined with the operating system. Research's principal analyst of semiconductor research, Alan Varghese, "Just like Yogi's logic on baseball, the transition to HSDPA will require more than just software at the base station." Some infrastructure will require hardware additions such as channel cards, traffic processing units and backplane modifications to handle the increased capacity and throughput of HSDPA. And the client side is definitely more than just software. Hardware in the form of advanced baseband chipsets will be required to handle the high data throughput while consuming little power; diversity receive circuitry may be required to handle the 16-QAM of HSDPA; and increased handset memory will also be needed. Lastly, as a reminder, EDGE was supposed to be an easy software upgrade from GSM/GPRS, but it still took the industry a couple of years to sort through all the issues with testing, interoperability with different vendors, and roaming to other cellular protocols. ABI Research's study, "HSDPA - Mobile Broadband" discusses all these issues in detail. In addition it examines the drivers for HSDPA, the deployment schedules of operators, and the timelines and volumes for HSDPA Infrastructure, PC Cards, Handsets, and ICs. Founded in 1990 and headquartered in New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of , ABI Research maintains global operations that support annual research programs, intelligence services and market reports in wireless, automotive, semiconductors, broadband, and energy. Their market research products can be found on the Web at www.abiresearch.com, or by calling 516.624.2500. |
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