Despite Nokia Siemens Networks laying off 17,000 employees, that doesn’t mean that the company has stopped innovating. Today they’ve announced that they’re going to perform the world’s first public demo of HSPA+ Multiflow at Mobile World Congress later this month. So what the hell is it and why should you care? Right now your smartphone talks to just one cell tower at a time. It doesn’t matter if you’re in range of two cell towers, you’re only going to get a connection to the cell tower that’s closest to you. With HSPA+ Multiflow you’ll essentially be allowed to connect to two cell towers at once, which in turn decreases latency and increases download speeds. Now infrastructure vendors always show off stuff that never leaves the labs, but HSPA+ Multiflow is officially a part 3GPP Release 11, which should become standardized later this year. All operators will have to do is apply a software update to their existing network, and boom, they’ll be HSPA+ Multiflow enabled.
There’s a catch to all of this of course. There are no devices currently on the market that support HSPA+ Multiflow, so users will need to buy new hardware. Considering NSN doesn’t think this technology will be commercially ready until the second half of 2013, there’s not too much to worry about. In fact, we’re pretty sure that Qualcomm, Ericsson, Intel, and everyone else working on cellular radios, will implement HSPA+ Multiflow into their hardware platforms before network operators even start supporting the the technology.
It should be noted that by late 2013 they’ll be 4G LTE networks all over Europe and Asia, so HSPA+ Multiflow might not make too much of a difference. Still, we’ll repeat what we said earlier, that it’s nice to see innovation on the infrastructure side marching on, despite already being “good enough” today.
[Via: Gizmodo]