In October last year Telstra spurred on the Australian uptake of the 3.5G standard by launching its Next G network based on HSDPA. Telstra's 3.6 Mbps Next G network is currently expected to offer download speeds of up to five times faster than other 3GSM networks, and may soon hit speeds of up to 14.4 Mbps as it is upgraded to HSUPA.
Vodafone was not far behind, launching its own 1.8Mbps HSDPA network a fortnight later. Meanwhile, Optus is currently trialing HSDPA technology over its Sydney and Canberra networks, and Hutchison is expected to soon follow with a 3.6Mbps network by March.
A cellular inevitability
HSPA is a fairly simple data-centric upgrade that will consolidate GSM- and CDMA-based networks, explains Jerson Yau, IDC Australia Research Analyst for Wireless and Mobility. And besides being faster than current 3G technologies, HSPA providers will be able to boost their networks from 1.8 Mbps to the 3.6, 14.4, 40, and 100Mbps standards via simple software upgrades.
Due to the ease of management and the speeds it offers, Yau expects the move towards HSPA to be an inevitable next step for cellular networks. "It's a necessary stepping stone," he said. "It's so easy to manage, and the gains and benefits are something to brag about."
In fact, as many as 80 percent of mobile subscribers worldwide are expected to be part of the GSM/GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA path by 2007, according to Kursten Leins, Strategic Marketing Manager for Mobility Solutions of Ericsson Australia.
"Eventually all WCDMA networks are expected to be upgraded to HSPA," she said. "WCDMA/HSPA networks are key components in offering users richer mobile services.
"HSPA delivers true mobile broadband services over existing WCDMA infrastructure, providing mobile operators with a new revenue stream based on existing user behavior and demand."
4G alternatives
But while HSPA provides significantly higher speeds than its 3G cellular predecessors, there are those who claim that "true" wireless broadband speeds are yet to come.
"3G doesn't give us true broadband," said Peter Newcombe, president of Nortel Networks' carrier networks division for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, at the Broadband World Forum held in Paris late last year.
Newcombe defined true broadband as speeds at which users can't tell whether the content and applications they're using are stored locally in their device or on a far-off server. These speeds will be provided by technologies such as WiMax, LTE (long-term evolution), and a flavor of CDMA known as Ref C, he said.
Newcombe's views were echoed by Eric Hamilton, CTO of Sydney-based WiMax provider, Unwired, who said that while cellular carriers may attempt to match the price and performance of wireless broadband Internet using voice-based technology, the reality is, there are limitations.
"The uplink capability in HSDPA is no different to 3G, so while the carriers can talk about high speed downloads, uploads are shackled," he explained. "A true broadband customer uploads approximately about one half of the bytes that he/she downloads, and the total traffic is in the region of 1.5GBs per month. An HSDPA solution will not cope with any reasonable number of customers acting this way."
A neck-and-neck call
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Leins, of cellular hardware vendor Ericsson, disagrees, being of the viewpoint that WiMax and HSPA can exist harmoniously since they each have different functions.
"Ericsson sees WiMax [the 802.16e standard] primarily as an open standard for fixed broadband wireless access, which can make up a natural part of an operator's Ethernet broadband offering," she said. "WiMax is optimized for fixed or portable 'nomadic' broadband wireless access and targets a different segment from 3G, which combines mobile telephony and mobile broadband access."
IDC's Yau used the analogy of petrol and diesel to explain the differences between WiMax and HSPA. "Your car only does one or the other," he said, "so you either drive a car or a truck.
"It's a neck-and-neck call, because I mean, at one stage, everyone wants to drive a car, but on the other hand, we definitely need trucks on the road. They each have their users."
But the comparison of HSPA and WiMax may not be so simple, he said. While the incumbent mobile carriers in Australia may be turning to HSPA on the way to their 4G platforms, carriers such as Nextel in the United States and WiBro in South Korea have chosen the WiMax route instead.
"It is a very hazy battle to go through," said IDC's Yau. "We all thought 4G would be a cellular evolution, but [some carriers are] supplanting cellular technology at the Fourth Generation with mobile WiMax."
From the current state of the Australian wireless industry, the 4G technologies, to be expected in about four to five years' time, would have evolved from HSPA, Yau said.
"I don't think we'd go to be utilizing the WiMAX standard," he said, adding that when it comes down to it, it would be up to service and equipment providers to "drive the vision" towards 4G.
Howard Dahdah, Rodney Gedda and James Niccolai contributed to this story.