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Mobile Broadband to Hit 42Mb/sec In 2009

Posted by timothy on from the we'll-see-about-that dept.

Barence writes "Mobile broadband speeds could hit a blistering 42Mb/sec as early as next year, according to Ericsson's chief technology officer. The idea seems far-fetched given that even the fastest dongles currently hover at around 7.2Mb/sec, but the technology to smash that barrier is thought to be just around the corner. One of the methods is very similar to the MIMO technology already used in draft-N wireless routers, but Ericsson believes a combination of factors may even squeeze that figure to 80Mb/sec in the longer term."

3 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. The Technology behind the speed by dutt · · Score: 3, Informative
    The technology is called Long Term Evolution (LTE) and is part of the 4th generation of mobile telephony.

    More information about it is found here:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3GPP_Long_Term_Evolution

    The article doesn't mention a lot of facts and it also fails to mention that speeds upto 100 Mbit/s is the goal for LTE. So this will be the next step in broadband services over wireless mobile networks.

  2. view from the tranches by slonik · · Score: 4, Informative

    As someone who works in the field of wireless cellular physical layer (MIMO, FEC, etc.) I would offer a bit of a reality check. As a rule of thumb in a wireless mobile environment with large cells even with MIMO, LDPC or Turbo coding, advanced QAM modulation, etc one should not expect spectral efficiency more than 4 bits/second/Hertz for an average user. And even this number is optimistic and assumes low mobility speeds and low interference.
    For a 40MHz full-duplex channel (half the resources in uplink, half in downlink) one would optimistically expect 80Mbits/sec per cell downlink or uplink. This capacity will be shared amoung all the users served by the cell. If, as a user, you get 8Mbits/second sustained throughput, consider yourself lucky.

  3. Re:Who cares about bandwidth? by George_Ou · · Score: 5, Informative

    HSDPA 3G is the technology we have now that's 7.2 Mbps. It has a interface latency of 150 ms round trip.

    HSPA+ is the technology coming out in 2009 that this article is talking about which has a downstream capacity of 44 Mbps, and I think they're trimming the latency down to about 90ms round trip.

    LTE is the next gen technology launching in 2010 and it will go 85 Mbps downstream on 2xMIMO using 10 MHz of frequency. It can go 300+ Mbps using 20 MHz 4xMIMO. They're getting the air interface latency down to 20 ms round trip which is getting really good and it's only 10 ms higher latency than wired DSL. It all depends on your application requirements. If you only care about VoIP and online gaming, you don't even need 100 Kbps and all you want is the lowest ping times. You only need the burst speed for web surfing and downloading new maps, etc.