HIGH-SPEED PACKET ACCESS

'High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA)' is a collection of mobile telephony protocols that extend and improve the performance of existing UMTS protocols. Two standards HSDPA and HSUPA have been established and a further standard HSOPA is being proposed.

Contents

Overview

High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA)

High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA)

Evolved High Speed Packet Access (Evolved HSPA, HSPA Evolved, HSPA+, I-HSPA,...)

High Speed OFDM Packet Access (HSOPA)

Overview

The two existing standards (HSDPA and HSUPA) in the family provide increased performance by using improved modulation schemes and by refining the protocols by which handsets and base stations communicate. These improvements lead to a better utilization of the existing radio bandwidth provided by UMTS.

High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA)

Main articles: HSDPA

HSDPA provides improved down-link performance of up to 14.4 Mbit/s theoretically. Existing deployments provide up to 7.2 Mbit/s in down-link. Up-link performance is a maximum of 384 kbit/s.
Service providers such as T-Mobile cap this rate to 1.4 Mbit/s despite the fact that modern 3G handsets are designed to handle speeds of up to 3.6 Mbit/s. Voice calls are usually prioritized over data transfer.
Croatian VIPnet network supports the speed of 7.2 Mbit/s in down-link. In South Korea, a nationwide 7.2Mbit/s coverage is now established by SK Telecom and KT.

High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA)

Main articles: HSUPA

HSUPA provides improved up-link performance of up to 5.76 Mbit/s theoretically. In Singapore, Starhub announced 1.9 Mbit/s HSUPA Service as part of its new MaxMobile plan in 1 Aug 2007 [1]

Evolved High Speed Packet Access (Evolved HSPA, HSPA Evolved, HSPA+, I-HSPA,...)

Main articles: Evolved HSPA

Evolved HSPA is defined in 3GPP release 7 (expected in 2007). It introduces simpler IP centric architecture for the mobile network bypassing most of the legacy equipment and enhances radio data rates.

High Speed OFDM Packet Access (HSOPA)

Main articles: HSOPA

The HSOPA is currently under development, aiming for maximum transfer rates of 100 Mbit/s for the down-link and 50 Mbit/s for the up-link.