Ericsson, the most popular supplier of wireless infrastructure equipment, has recently published some statistics including this doozy: 225,000 terabytes of data were moved every month over wireless networks during Q2 of this year. The Swedish firm goes on to say that mobile data traffic has tripled compared to this time last year and that it’s growing over 10 times faster than voice traffic.
Equally impressive are statistics provided by the GSMA which announced that there are now over 100 mobile networks around the world that are either using HSPA+ technology or are in the process of deploying it right now. Note that the first HSPA+ network launched only 18 months ago, in Australia by Telstra. Out of the roughly 300 HSPA networks around the world, between 15% and 20% of them have upgraded to HSPA+. Most of those networks are rated for 21 megabits per second, but several large operators, including T-Mobile USA, are planning to upgrade their networks to hit 42 megabits per second.
And finally we have an independent study [PDF] done by Signals Research, funded by the GSMA, that shows HSPA+ delivering comparable speeds to WiMAX. Using data collected over the course of 2009, Signals Research found that over 50% of the time they were using Testra’s 21 megabit per second network they were able to achieve over 5 megabit per second download speeds. When they were stationary in their hotel room, which was only during 10% of their testing, they were able to get between 10 megabits and 15 megabits per second consistently, and over 17 megabits per second in the early hours of the morning. When they compared that to Sprint’s WiMAX network they found the results comparable even though the two networks couldn’t be any more different. Telstra’s network was deployed on the 850 MHz band, Sprint’s WiMAX was on the 2500 MHz band. Testra’s network used between 10 MHz and 20 MHz worth of spectrum, while Sprint’s network used 30 MHz in non-urban areas and 60 MHz in densely populated areas.
Moral of the story: WiMAX is a waste of time and money, people want mobile data, and HSPA+ is what you should use to give it to them until LTE equipment gets cheap enough to deploy.