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The Evolution of UMTS
By Mark Evans | February 22, 2005
As wireless carriers look to drive revenue from data, there's a lot of talk about next-generation networks - be they UMTS, EVDO, 1X, etc. During Rogers Communications' fourth-quarter conference call last week, CEO Nadir Mohamed talked a lot about HSDPA, which is the seen as the evolution of UMTS technology.
In a recent report, TD Securities said it was impressed with Nortel's technology during demos at the 3GSM show in Cannes. “Nortel was only vendor actually willing to show off HDSPA in public view using a standard PC card as the consumer terminal,” TD said. “Most other vendors hid their “solution” from inspection by conference-goers. Nortel hooked up a HSDPA-enabled base station to the existing commercial UMTS network in Cannes (built by Nortel last year, owned by Orange).
TD also came away from Cannes with some questions about how carriers are going to drive revenue from wireless broadband technology. Most executives, it discovered, were strong on hyperbole but vague on details. The two big questions are what applications wll be pumped down the pipe (e-mail, music, real Web, etc.) and how much people are willing to spend for mobile speed.
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February 22nd, 2005 at 12:47 pm
the push pull world of building out that wireless pipe and awaiting the applications will always exist. Two mainstream technologies have ruled the world (one more dominant than other) GSM and CDMA. The respective migration paths to wireless broadband are now very clear.
GSM->3G->HSPDA
CDMA->1X->EVDO Rev.A
And then there's the WiMAX unknown factor. The application market is ever changing and quickly evolving. That extra bandwidth will be swallowed up quite quickly. I think the challenge is how regularly will people pay for it (as always this question is).
I bet you 1-2 years ago most pundits would not believe the uptake in camera phones would be so great and photo sharing could become such a strong app in wireless…
certainly this is an interesting industry as the pipe grows…