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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (61793)	4/2/2007 8:26:35 AM
From: slacker711	Respond to of 197340

Revolutionary Technology Choice wirelessweek.com By Brad Smith April 1, 2007 Wireless Week W-CDMA operators face a decision on which technology to use in the future. Evolution versus revolution. That’s the decision carriers in the W-CDMA community are facing. According to the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA), 145 operators in 66 countries around the world have committed to adding the high-speed downlink HSDPA element to their W-CDMA networks. Most, if not all, also will upgrade to the high-speed uplink HSUPA technology starting as early as this year. Those two upgrades, which together are being called high-speed packet access (HSPA), will provide data rates as high as 14.4 Mbps on the downlink and 5.72 Mbps on the uplink, using 5 MHz of spectrum. Real-world data rates undoubtedly will be considerably lower than those numbers, but still impressive considering what cellular networks offered just a few years ago. After taking those HSPA steps, though, the future looks a bit cloudier for the carriers. Do they take the evolutionary path, which is less of a financial and technological gamble, or do they take the dicier revolutionary path? The evolutionary path for the W-CDMA community is represented by an upgrade – which could be software only in some cases – that is called HSPA+ or HSPA Evolution. The revolution, which could require new spectrum, new equipment and most certainly new technology, is Long Term Evolution (LTE). The LTE name is a bit of a misnomer because the vendors see it as a mid-term technology that could be available by the end of this decade, but it also is revolutionary in the sense that it requires almost a complete overhaul of the radio network. The standardization of LTE by the 3GPP is expected to be completed by the end of 2008 and will support data rates as high as 150 Mbps on the downlink and 20 MHz up, although that is using 20 MHz of spectrum. HSPA+ is seen by some as a way for carriers to gain some of the benefits of LTE without paying the revolutionary price. “For any carrier who wants to significantly increase performance over Release 5 and Release 6 of UMTS earlier than LTE will become available, [HSPA+] clearly has advantages,” says Peter Carson, product management director for Qualcomm Technologies. Qualcomm has announced plans to start sampling by the end of the year a chipset named MDM8200 that supports HSPA+. The chip, based on the 3GPP Release 7 standard for UMTS, is capable of data rates up to 28 Mbps on the downlink and 11 Mpbs up, as well as doubling network data capacity and reducing latency, the company says. Qualcomm is the first company to announce an HSPA+ chip for the modem market. Carson says data cards using the HSPA+ chip will be available commercially by the end of 2008. Analysts believe that’s about the same time that infrastructure vendors such as Ericsson, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei will have base stations ready for network installation. Several vendors say LTE infrastructure could be ready for carriers in 2009, although some expect that to slide into the next decade. Carson says Qualcomm expects LTE infrastructure to be available in 2010. NTT DoCoMo is pushing its own Super 3G technology, which presumably will be similar to LTE, for commercialization in 2009. Carson says HSPA+ conceivably could delay the launch of LTE by some carriers, but he also thinks that some carriers will want to push ahead with the faster technology as soon as it is available. Others will take a more wait-and-see attitude, hoping to leverage their existing investment in UMTS/HSPA. GEARING UP “With every new technology there is a hype cycle they go through,” he says. “Brand new technologies generally do take longer than people imagine. That’s why we think HSPA is very strategic.” The main difference between HSPA+ and LTE is in their modulation schemes. The former uses Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM), as well as multiple antennas, called MIMO (multiple-in, multiple-out). LTE also uses QAM and MIMO but adds orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). OFDM, expected to be used in virtually all radio networks in the future including WiMAX, is what requires the forklift in the radio access network. Will HSPA+ do what its advocates expect? Michael Thelander, who has a masters degree in solid state physics and is chief analyst for Signals Research, said in a recent research paper that he is “still not convinced” that HSPA+ will be a mainstream technology. The problem, Thelander says, is that HSPA+ with MIMO will only provide the advertised data and capacity benefits in a small part of a cell. “The single biggest determining factor on whether or not those data rates can be achieved is the location of the user in the cell,” he says. Others in the industry are more optimistic about what HSPA+ will mean. The UMTS Forum said in a white paper last year that it expects there will be 1 billion subscribers using HSPA and HSPA+ by 2012. If so, that would be a plus for the technology.