The iPhone Baseband HSDPA IC from Infineon and Other HSPA Matters
Our old imported from Finland Big Apple based friend Tero Kuittinen gets prominent mention in the 1st article below. It looks like he has a new position and new firm. Fourteen months ago he left Avian Securities to join Global Crown Capital (GCC) of the Bay Area as Senior Executive Director, Global Equity Research ...
Message 24771013
He is evidently now the rookie telecom analyst with MKM Partners according to the 1st article below:
mkmpartners.com
He should be pleased that HSPA chipsets with both HSDPA and HSUPA are showing up in new Nokia Symbian/S60 smartphones -- since he slammed Nokia with a downgrade a few months back over his perception of their smartphone range evolution -- running either Symbian v9,3 S60 FP3 or V9.4 S605E, although the E71x exclusive for AT&T is HSDPA only and the new Mako probably is too. The new E72 (the very popular E71 update) is HSDPA/HSUPA. as is the Nokia 6720 classic, Nokia 6730 classic, Nokia E52 and of course the N97 flagship with Touch UI AND QWWERTY hard tilting keyboard (although the new N86 imaging flagship and the mass market 5800 XpressMusic with Touch UI are HSDPA only).
It should be noted that AT&T Mobility does not yet support HSDPA at 7.2Mbps peak downlink and won't on any scale till well into next year, and doesn't yet support HSUPA.
I should add that while the iPhone 3GS may not support HSUPA, it's come a long way in many respects in the 2 years since its dumbphone (no 3rd party apps support) debut. The Samsung apps processor is fast, damned fast, and it now does many of the things it had to do and should have done in the last rev. [and yes, by way of disclosure I have taken a bite of the AAPL but own no Apples other than a Granny Smith or 2 in the kitchen or dining room fruit bowls].
The 2nd article below on HSPA and HSPA+ (and WiMax and EV-DO) is above average good and quite informative, IMO. I think it's worth a careful read.
>> Slow Chip Stifles iPhone 3GS Upload Speeds
Brian X. Chen
Wired | Gadget Lab
July 9, 2009
wired.com
The “S” in iPhone 3GS stands for “speed,” but it could very well stand for “slow” if you look at the dated chip it uses for uploading data.
At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, the company proudly boasted that the new iPhone 3GS supports 7.2Mbps High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) — a faster, next-generation network standard that many carriers plan to adopt. However, downlink only refers to download speeds; the company made no mention of uplink speeds, or how fast users will be able to upload data.
That’s probably because Apple didn’t want anyone to know that the iPhone 3GS contains a 3G chip with a surprisingly low upload speed — a Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systemchip High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (UMTS HSDPA) chip, one of the earliest 3G technologies that phones were using years ago, according to Tero Kuittinen, an
A teardown by iPhone repair company RapidRepair revealed the UMTS HSDPA chip, whose upload speed is capped at 384 Kbps — significantly slower than its 7.2Mbps downlink capability. A combination of a high download speed and a low upload speed was typical for most mobile chips two years ago, but today, most high-end smartphones offer 2 to 5 Mbps upload speed, Kuittinen explained.
Kuittinen believes Apple purposely kept the uplink details of the chip secret to help its wireless partners.
“Carriers are frantic on this issue of how to prevent consumers from overloading the mobile data without creating obvious obstacles,” Kuittinen said. “They have to somehow clamp down on heavy mobile users without telling consumers they’re being hamstrung.”
When marketing their broadband services, carriers and internet providers typically advertise their downlink speeds and care little to highlight uplink. And it’s clear why: The average consumer cares more about how quickly he or she can receive rather than give. However, for iPhone 3GS owners, slow network uploading speeds will likely discourage them from taking advantage of one their phone’s major new powers: video recording and sharing.
Then again, U.S. consumers typically aren’t keen about uploading video, Kuittinen said. He noted that 90 percent of Nokia smartphone users don’t use video-sharing features. Video-sharing has been most popular among Japanese consumers, who tend to be more multimedia savvy thanks to the complex feature sets in their cellphones, Kuittinen said.
But a large consequence of slow uploading is that it stifles the iPhone 3GS’ potential to make the rest of the globe more interested in mobile video, Kuittinen said.
“How many people are going to spend 10 minutes uploading a 30-second clip?” he said. “That’s going to take real commitment…. People are going to buy the device and only then are they going to figure out [video sharing] is basically undoable.”
In a previous report, Wired.com examined the implications of Apple and AT&T prohibiting a TV-streaming application called SlingMobile from working on cellular networks. Apple asked Sling to revise the app so it only works on a Wi-Fi connection rather than 3G networks, and AT&T said this move was necessary to prevent network congestion. In that story, Ken Biba, founder of wireless consultant firm Novarum, said that after performing a stress test on 3G networks in the United States, it was clear that AT&T’s network was overloaded.
“The new iPhone 3GS is going to have a massive upswing of people uploading video, and it’s going to stress both the downstream and the upstream network,” Biba said. “When you begin to add video you’re adding even more high congestion.”
That upswing is already occurring. Video-sharing site YouTube said in a blog post that uploads to YouTube were increasing 400 percent a day ever since the iPhone 3GS launched. YouTube officials Dwipal Desai and Mia Quagliarello said video-enabled phones with streamlined video-sharing tools were driving 1,700 percent growth in uploads in the last six months. In that story, Wired.com pondered what Apple and AT&T were going to do to address upstream traffic for the iPhone 3GS, a particularly popular phone with a very easy-to-use video-uploading feature.
Kuittinen called the slower chip an elegant solution for Apple and AT&T to avoid overloading networks with the iPhone 3GS’ video-savvy powers.
“It’s kind of clever, I have to say,” Kuittinen said. “This is more elegant than doing the capping from the operator. Now that it’s a hardware limitation, you can’t do anything about it. You can’t call AT&T and say, ‘Why are you slowing down the upload speeds?’”
Despite his testing confirming that uploads are capped at 384Kbps on the iPhone 3GS, Biba does not agree with Kuittinen that Apple purposely used this chip to appease to networks such as AT&T. He said that significantly boosting the uplink capability would hurt the iPhone 3GS’ battery life, which is probably why Apple opted not to upgrade the phone with faster uploading capability. (Enough consumers are already complaining about the iPhone 3GS’ battery life to begin with.)
“We can talk about the future of doing video, but there aren’t a whole lot of people doing it,” Biba said. “I doubt they did it for AT&T. I think it’s more power consumption.”
Apple did not return phone calls seeking comment on this story. AT&T declined to comment. ###
>> The Rise and Rise of HSPA
Ken Wieland
Telecoms.com
July 6, 2009
telecoms.com
HSPA is on a roll. According to figures supplied by market research firm Wireless Intelligence, there were 245 HSPA networks in commercial service worldwide as of mid-May 2009. Moreover, a further 113 HSPA networks are in the process of being deployed, trialed or planned.
True, the majority of HSPA networks in commercial service operate at the lower end of the throughput performance scale. The Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) says that, of today’s active HSPA networks, more than 70 per cent are restricted to 3.6Mbps peak downlink rates-the bulk of the remainder offer 7.2Mbps peak. But the vendor community is not standing still.
“Today’s HSPA networks are capable of peak bit-rates of 14.4Mbps,” says Hans Beijner, a product portfolio manager at Ericsson. “The first networks using 64QAM modulation, giving 21Mbps, are also in operation.”
The use of higher order modulation schemes (from 16QAM up to 64QAM), along with MIMO technology, takes HSPA into ‘HSPA+’ territory. HSPA+ comes courtesy of 3GPP Release 7.
“Later this summer we will see the first commercial networks using MIMO supporting 28Mbps, and that will be followed quickly by the first networks supporting 42Mbps, using multi-carrier as described in Release 8 of 3GPP,” continues Beijner. “Next year we will see further enhancements to HSPA, utilising multi-carrier with MIMO and 64QAM modulation, which enables bit-rates of 84Mbps. This is part of Release 9 but further enhancements will come in Release 10 where it will be possible to use MIMO and 64QAM on four carriers, which will enable [peak] downlink bit-rates of 168Mbps.”
Developments are also moving apace on the latency and uplink fronts. Beijner again: “The first steps are being taken to reduce the TTI from 10ms down to 2ms, which would enable uplink rates of 5.8Mbps and a reduction in latency from today’s 50-60ms to 25-30ms,” he says. “The next step for the uplink is the introduction of 16QAM modulation, which will double the uplink bit-rate to 11.6Mbps. The combination of 16QAM modulation and multi carrier [Release 9] will give uplink bit-rates of 23.2Mbps in the 2010 timeframe.”
Despite the dazzling HSPA+ roadmap laid out by 3GPP network suppliers, only a handful of mobile operators have launched a commercial 21Mbps network or have it in trial. Telstra in Australia is the HSPA+ trailblazer with commercial operations already underway, while CSL in Hong Kong (a Telstra subsidiary) is among the few operators that are trialling 21Mbps HSPA+.
The GSA reports that many of today’s 3.6Mbps and 7.2Mbps HSPA operators are evolving to HSUPA, which requires ‘only’ a software upgrade: HSUPA provides an uplink peak of 5.8Mbps (as well as 14.4Mbps on the downlink). But 3GPP operators will have to think very carefully whether or not they want (or need) to go the full HSPA+ hog, or just simply wait until LTE arrives. HSPA+, using MIMO, requires additional base station hardware in the shape of antennas, which means extra capex-that could upset the business case for near- to mid-term HSPA+ deployment.
So where does all this leave WiMAX, a nascent fixed and mobile broadband technology looking to spoil the 3GPP party? Supporters of the 802.16e standard repeatedly claim that with peak downlink data rates of 40Mbps and peak uplink speeds of 10Mbps, it easily outstrips current HSPA performance.
Chris Pearson, president of 3G Americas, a 3GPP operator lobby group, believes HSPA+ deployments will cast a long shadow over WiMAX. When telecoms.com asked Pearson to assess the market threat of Clearwire, the flagship mobile WiMAX operator in the US, he unequivocally rejected the notion, often put forward by WIMAX supporters, that Clearwire-and other mobile WIMAX operators like it-should be seen as ‘complementary’ to 3G and ‘3.5G’ on the grounds that HSPA simply can’t match the data performance of WIMAX. 3G, say WiMAX supporters, is for nationwide voice and ‘narrowband’ mobile data, but 802.16e offers ‘true’ mobile broadband and a much better mobile internet experience.
Not so, says Pearson. “3G Americas and some independent technical research analysts have studied the performance metrics of WiMAX versus HSPA and HSPA+, and WiMAX has technical performance characteristics that are similar to HSPA and HSPA+,” he says. “Mobile WiMAX is not necessarily complementary to HSPA as HSPA is currently providing typical throughput speeds of 700-1700Kbps for downloads and 500-1200Kbps for uploads.”
That still means that current HSPA network performance is a little bit behind that of Clearwire, since the US WiMAX operator offers a typical downlink data speed of somewhere between 2Mbps and 4Mbps. But Pearson believes the HSPA roadmap will put WiMAX in the shade. “Typical peak user rates for HSPA+ have the possibility of reaching 5Mbps on the downlink and 3Mbps on the uplink,” he says.
But the fight for subscribers between WiMAX and HSPA will not just be fought on the battleground of throughput performance. Network coverage and device variety, says Pearson, will also be key market differentiators. “All major cities in the US currently offer HSPA coverage versus the two major cities with mobile WiMAX,” he says. “Sprint Nextel’s dual-mode WiMAX-EV-DO devices will help the Clearwire service offering a bit, as it fills the tremendous coverage challenges that WiMAX is currently having in the US. However, HSPA is clearly being chosen by mobile broadband customers throughout the US, as shown by the tremendous subscriber gains made by T-Mobile USA and AT&T Mobility during 2008.”
According to Wireless Intelligence, there were over 122 million active HSPA connections worldwide as of mid-May 2009. The market research firm predicts that by end Q209 there will be nearly 149 million HSPA users in total, up from nearly 59 million by end Q208. Wireless Intelligence further reports that there are now over 1,350 HSPA enabled devices on the market from over 130 different suppliers. WiMAX, on the other hand, has fewer than 100 devices to its name. And with AT&T having signalled its intention to spend $11bn this year on upgrading its current 7.2Mbps networks to HSPA+ (21Mbps), it looks like Clearwire and the WiMAX camp will come under even more competitive pressure.
For Intel, the US chip giant that has put billions of dollars behind WiMAX, the ‘HSPA versus WIMAX’ debate has been skewed by too much talk of headline data rates. “The peak data rates [the 3GPP camp] claim are exactly that,” says Siavash Alamouti, CTO of Intel’s Mobile Wireless Group. “Translate them to average capacity and you have significantly less capacity than you have with an OFDM system using MIMO. If HSPA had the same performance as WiMAX or LTE, we would not need these OFDM/MIMO technologies.”
As mobile WiMAX Release 1.0 (802.16e) is capable of 40Mbps peak downlink data rates, and peak uplink data rates of 10Mbps, Alamouti sees no meaningful competitive challenge to today’s mobile WiMAX networks in terms of typical, real-life performance. At the WiMAX Congress Asia 2009 event held in Singapore in April, the ‘better than cellular’ argument was heard loud and clear.
“Performance is the big differentiator and key for subscriber acquisition,” said Michael Lai, CEO of Malaysian operator Packet One (P1), which launched a commercial WIMAX service in August 2008. P1 claims it is achieving typical downlink speeds of between 5Mbps and 6Mbps compared to the sub-2Mbps level offered by Malaysia’s mobile operators. “In our demonstration at service launch, our WiMAX service far exceeded the performance of 3.5G, achieving up to 10Mbps on the downlink and 3Mbps on the uplink,” declared Peter Yen, president of Tatung Infocomm, a WIMAX operator in Taiwan. “3.5G typically offers 2Mbps on the downlink and 1Mbps on the uplink.”
Yen is confident that WIMAX will provide the network platform to propel Tatung Infocomm into a ‘full service digital provider’- which includes offering TV services-and compete head-on against the island’s cable and DSL providers, as well as 3G. The argument here, of course, is that because WiMAX can offer fixed, portable and mobile services over a single network, the business case for deployment is much more attractive than having to roll out different networks to serve different markets: 3G for mobile; DSL or fibre for fixed; and wifi hotspots for faster portable services.
“HSPA comes from the cellular model, while WiMAX is about the consumer electronics and internet model,” adds Intel’s Alamouti. “If you look at the protocol stack for WiMAX, you see Layer 1 and Layer 2 followed by IP on all the nodes. In 3GPP, you have legacy circuit switched elements, which were inserted into the protocol stack as a compromise between telephony-driven and IP-friendly companies. HSPA is more for smartphone-like applications and will not be able to meet the demands of bandwidth-rich devices, such as PCs, MIDs and netbooks. These devices will put a lot of strain on HSPA networks.”
Aside from the extra capacity WiMAX has, due to having what it claims as much better spectral efficiency than 3G, as well as wider channels-10MHz as opposed to the 5MHz channels used by 3G operators-802.16e Release 1.0 also lays claim to a much superior RAN latency performance according to data provide by Intel: 40ms latency for 802.16e compared with the 50-250ms for both HSPA and HSUPA. (It is worth noting, however, that Ericsson’s Beijner disputes Intel’s latency calculations, pointing out that they don’t take into consideration a shorter TTI. He says the correct latency figure for the 5.8Mbps uplink on HSUPA is 25-30ms.)
Alamouti also argues the cellular business model falls well short of WiMAX in terms of matching the lower opex costs that an all-IP flat architecture brings. “3GPP networks have still got to support legacy protocols, and are generally more complex, which make it less internet friendly,” he continues. For some analysts, however, the technical and business case advantages that WiMAX might have over 3G are becoming increasingly irrelevant in light of commercial developments. “Yes, WiMAX backers are right to point out that mobile WiMAX has some technical advantages over existing mobile broadband systems, but EV-DO and HSPA backers are also right to point to their massive scale advantages over mobile WiMAX,” says Mike Roberts, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media. “For example, HSPA and EV-DO together had more than 180 million subscribers worldwide at end-2008, compared to fewer than one million for mobile WiMAX [out of a 3.6 million total of WiMAX subscribers].
This translates into cost advantages that mobile WiMAX will struggle to overcome.” Roberts continues: “Commercial results are what really matter and the early signs are not good for mobile WiMAX when it has gone head-to-head with HSPA and EV-DO. In four key markets with relatively large WiMAX launches- Korea, Australia, Malaysia and the US-WiMAX has only managed to gain two per cent of the total mobile broadband market, compared to 58 per cent for EV-DO and 41 per cent for HSPA.”
There are some caveats to these figures, as Roberts points out, in that the comparison is not conclusive given the different launch dates and the different characteristics of each technology. “But even more direct comparisons do not favour WiMAX,” adds Roberts.
“In Korea, WiMAX is comparable to HSDPA since the services launched within a quarter of each other in 2006 and are both focused on supporting mobile broadband data services.
But at end-2008 there were 8.4 million HSPA subscribers in Korea, compared to around 350,000 WiMAX subscribers.”
But Dr. Hyun-Pyo Kim, director of the WiBro Business Unit at KT, points out that most of the new HSDPA subscribers in Korea come from current 2G and 3G users who have been tempted to upgrade to new devices by high subsidies. “There’s not much change in the total number of mobile voice subscribers and pure market growth is negligible,” says Dr. Kim. “The mobile broadband data market, however, is a totally different story. This is a newly emerging market and most of the WiBro subscribers are new data service users who didn’t switch from other alternate services.
The increase of WiBro subscribers implies almost pure and new market growth.” The WiMAX camp also vehemently argues that, because of a distributed IPR regime, it can get non-subsidised WiMAX data cards and dongles out into market at much cheaper retail prices than 3G, whose IPR arrangements are dominated by Qualcomm. UQ Communications, a 2.5GHz licence holder in Japan, is currently conducting WiMAX service trials for free, provided users stump up the cost of the dongle or data card, which retail for $130 and $140 respectively. UQ claims that the cost of a typical 3G data card, when customers don’t sign up to a long-term contract, is $350. The non-subsidised device business model is something WiMAX sees as a key advantage over 3G. Dan Warren, director of technology at the GSM Association, suggests that the greater scale of the 3G market allows it to absorb the device subsidies, which, in turn, attracts more subscribers. “It doesn’t matter how much [the factory cost] of WiMAX devices undercut 3G, the price paid by the consumer is the one that counts,” he says.
Warren also questions the value of what the 802.16e customer gets for his data card money, particularly as WiMAX network coverage is limited. “The WiMAX data card is a Noddy device,” he says. “It doesn’t do a great deal for you if there is no fallback in terms of coverage. There are well over 100 countries where HSPA networks are deployed, and even where there is no HSPA coverage there is backwards compatibility [using HSPA devices] to pre-existing networks [GSM and WCDMA] with a roaming infrastructure already in place.”
Another bone of contention between WIMAX and 3G is the backhaul. Dr Teddy Huang, president CEO of Vmax, a WiMAX licensee in northern Taiwan, believes the more attractive WIMAX backhaul economics-compared with 3G-will be a key factor in offering a better performing and more cost-efficient service than cellular competitors. “3G operators use expensive TDM approaches with E1 [2Mbps] lines costing around NT$7,000 ($210) to NT$8,000 ($240) per month,” he says. “With WiMAX, we can use metro ethernet solutions that cost just a little more than NT$10,000 ($300) per month for 10Mbps capacity.”
This argument is given short shrift by Ericsson. “Even though most 2G and 3G networks today use TDM-based backhaul solutions, more and more operators are upgrading backhaul to IP-based fibre or microwave transmission,” says Beijner. “It is not correct to say that 3G is inherently ‘TDM-based’ as the change to IP transmission involves in most cases only a change of a transmission card in the base station.”
While the technical and business case arguments between HSPA and WiMAX are ongoing behind the scenes, the majority of mobile operators appear to have already made up their mind.
Only a major mobile WiMAX success story, in the shape of a Clearwire or a UQ, would force a radical reassessment of 802.16e’s role in the mobile broadband space. In the meantime, the HSPA juggernaut looks unstoppable.
- Eric - |
