Infrastructure partner Ericsson has announced that with the help of Singapore service provider, SingTel, they’ve hit data speeds of 168 Mbps downlink and 24 Mbps uplink on a multi-carrier HSPA network. While that might be a ways off to any commercial deployment, Ericsson also completed dual-carrier HSPA, striking speeds up to 84 Mbps (a speed currently available on HSPA+), and single-carrier 42 Mbps.
At speeds like 168 Mbps, I could see why the ITU might agree that 3G technologies like HSPA could qualify as 4G in the right circumstances, but in its current incarnation (HSPA+, WiMAX, and early stage LTE), it still feels like the definition was twisted around because of marketing pressure.
Whenever we do end up getting networks capable of pumping out 168 Mbps, the next hurdle will be hardware. Processing power is becoming less of a bottleneck for handling incoming data with the advent of dual-core handsets, but what about storage? If you’re able to viably download HD videos that are a couple of GB each over the air, folks will want more than 32 GB. The current microSDXC standard will support up to 2 TB in the long run, so long as the association can keep up memory card specifications with network improvements. Then there’s battery, which will probably pose the biggest problem, even if the devices and networks are as optimized as much as possible. Battery tech has pretty much plateaued, and barring any massive breakthroughs, we’ll probably still be using Li-ion batteries for the foreseeable future. All of that being said, these speeds will hit wireless USB modems before we start seeing them in phones.
In any case, I’d be interested in seeing if service providers would actually co-operate to offer higher speeds like this; it seems unlikely since a common network technology would mean people could switch carriers willy-nilly, and so carriers would have to compete on price (which wouldn’t really work in their favour, financially).
[via Ericsson]