Earlier this week T-Mobile announced that they’ve launched 42 Mbps HSPA+ in 11 new markets, bringing the total number of markets where their high speed wireless broadband is available to 163. To put that into plain English, roughly 180 million Americans now have access to 42 Mbps HSPA+. They also announced that they’ve brought 21 Mbps HSPA+ to 9 additional markets, bringing the total to 208 markets, or more than 200 million Americans. Now for reasons we don’t quite understand, HSPA+ isn’t getting the same amount of love that LTE is. It’s been shown that 42 Mbps HSPA+ can compete perfectly well with LTE in terms of download speeds. Not only that, but HSPA+, unlike LTE, supports voice and SMS. Not a lot of 42 Mbps HSPA+ capable smartphones are currently on the market, but that’s due to change in 2012 when Qualcomm’s S4 processors start making their way into smartphones. Said chips not only do 42 Mbps HSPA+, but also LTE.
The bigger question here is what exactly are you going to do with that much bandwidth at your disposal? For most people on the move, all they do is check their email, browse the web, and feed their Facebook and Twitter addiction. You can happily do all that with 5 megabits per second. In Finland operators price their data by speed, not by data buckets. So you pay more for more megabits per second. This writer is capped at 1 megabit per second and has never, ever, complained about the speed of data on his iPhone 4. Some folks might be streaming HD video, but that’s a rare use case. Where these next generation networks actually become useful is rural communities which fixed line operators have usually ignored. Instead of wiring up a small village, just put a cell tower in the middle of town and boom, instant coverage.
If you’re taking advantage of LTE or 42 Mbps HSPA+ in ways other than tethering to your computer, please tell us in the comments below, because we frankly don’t understand this need for speed.