Samsung Shows Off 3.6Mbps Cellular

dsginter writes "At this week's CES, Samsung Electronics is showing off a 3.6Mbps cellular phone. The device uses High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) to acheive such speeds. "

Comments

HSDPA

[onion2k]

3.6Mbps is actually a little low for the protocol that they're using .. it's supposed to be able to do 8 - 10 Mbps. No mention of why it's not up to scratch in the article though..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSDPA

Re:On a phone?

[User 956]

This is not useful untill/unless it is connected to a computer. With a connection to a laptop it would kick arse, I use PDANet on my Treo 650 connected to my laptop, and it's pretty good. It basically turns your treo into a pretty decent wireless modem. Certainly better than paying $10 for wireless everytime I want to check outlook at the airport on my laptop.

Re:carriers?

[dokebi]

LOL. This rides on top of EV-DO, not UMTS, so will be available a lot sooner than you allude. Sure, UMTS is long time coming in the US, but Verizon has already deployed EV-DO with avg 1Mbps bandwidth.

Also, unlike in Europe, in the US UMTS has to take away bandwidth from GSM to be functional, which will mean Verizon will continue eat Cingular's lunch for coverage and high-speed data.

Re:Okay

[LWATCDR]

Nokia doesn't offer a cell phone in the US that has EVDO and bluetooth I looked. The Screen on the Samsung A900 is great and the phone works pretty well except that it doesn't have enough ram and the battery life is a little short.

Re:CDMA, 1xRTT, EVDO, GSM, GPRS, EDGE

[squiggleslash]

HSDPA is part of the W-CDMA standard, which is Qualcomm's next generation high speed cellular tech

Not really. W-CDMA was developed by one of the Japanese networks (I forget which) and is an air interface technology (ie it forms the bottom layers of a mobile phone system, it's not a system by itself.) One of the standards that runs over it is UMTS, which is essentially the next version of GSM. Qualcomm had little to do with W-CDMA's development, though they're nominally supporting it.

Qualcomm's mobile phone standard is called IS-95, is often refered to as CDMA, and will not likely use W-CDMA at any time soon.

FYI, CDMA is a peer of GSM. CDMA is used by Sprint, Verizon, Alltel etc, while GSM is used by T-Mobile, Cingular. 1xRTT is CDMA data, while GPRS is GSM data. EVDO et al are high speed CDMA data, while the EDGE stuff is GSM's answer

EDGE is a bolt on to existing GSM networks to improve data rates and is nominally 3G, but on the bottom end of that. However, UMTS is ultimately GSM's path to 3G data rates. W-CDMA and HSDPA are supported by UMTS. So you'll see Cingular and T-Mobile rolling this technology out, while Sprint PCS, Verizon, et al, rolling out the EVDO stuff.