Motorola Releases HSDPA Trial Findings
In an article on Wireless Design Asia, I read the findings of a recent Motorola HSDPA trial conducted in Europe. Motorola concluded three items that are crucial to a successful rollout of HSDPA to provide “mobile broadband”.
First, sufficient processing power is needed. Latency can become a big problem when switching users from a low-speed state (like when browsing the web, reading a page, etc) to a high-speed state (ie: streaming audio). If a service is going to be billed as wireless broadband or mobile broadband, latency issues will not go over well with end users.
Second, handset functionality is key for performance of the system. A signal processing function known as an equalizer enhances performance of a HSDPA network when a user is moving. Equalizer enabled devices increased data rates by as much as 40% in the trial. This is something that few handsets on the market today have.
Last, video services need priority. Well, this probably doesn’t come as a shock to anyone. But, certainly one of the big marketing pushes by wireless broadband providers is going to be the access to multimedia items, like streaming video. Video streaming performance is relatively quick to degrade as the number of users increases. Priority must be given to these services to ensure that they perform at expected levels.
