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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."

10 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. To soon.... by slakdrgn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ....to guesstimate early next year. Aside from FCC approval do you really think most mobile broadband companies (well, AT&T and such) will hurry to implement this while citing issues with bandwidth and creating caps. Add that to RIAA influence and technology upgrades for carriers, it'll probably be at least 5-6 years before we see any consumer use of this technology.

  2. Yep by binarylarry · · Score: 4, Insightful

    42 Mb/sec.... standing next to the tower.

    Everywhere else, a tenth of that or less.

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    1. Re:Yep by p0tat03 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Still beats 2 Mb/sec standing next to the tower and a tenth of that everywhere else.

  3. Latency by Tubal-Cain · · Score: 5, Funny

    I hear a station wagon full of tapes gets pretty good bandwidth, too.

  4. And things will be the same. by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wow. 40+MBps speeds on cell networks, and text messages will still be .20$ per.

    Meh.

    --
  5. Contractual Limits by vlm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Mobile broadband speeds could hit a blistering 42Mb/sec

    I guarantee there will be one of two contractual limitations:

    1) "Unlimited" service forbids the downloading of any media files, use of any streaming applications, any online gaming purposes, any voip or video conference service, and has a cap of 100 megs per month which you'll reach in 2 seconds

    -or-

    2) "pay as you go data plan" only $150 for 100 megs per month which you'll also reach in two seconds.

    Cell phone providers are a confuse-opoloy of crooks whom exist solely to screw over their contractually enslaved victims as much as possible before they switch to another provider, whom coincidentally also only exists to screw over their "customers". Nothing but pure distilled "marketing". I hope they all go out of business in the recession.

    Other than that, yeah its great news.

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
  6. Who cares about bandwidth? by noname444 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What about latency and reliability?
    I'm happy with 3.6 Mbit/s, or even lower, if I get a reliable connection with low latency.
    Rock solid 512 kbit/s with 20 ms latency would be preferable to anything available in the mobile market right now.

    1. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Re:It's a WNBSITU by gad_zuki! · · Score: 4, Funny

    >So can we just call ourselves U from now on and (States of America) is implied? Then we can call Australia, A. Europe, E. Africa....F? Antarctica... N?

    Good idea, now African-American can just be abbreviated to F-U. Err, wait a second...