Wednesday, November 23, 2005

HSDPA fixed-line replacement?

HSDPA is generally welcomed for its speed and latency. However, one thing remains underexposed: spectrum limitations.

Cellular technology is based on sharing capacity. A huge succes of data services could easily congest the system, because mobile operators useually have only 5-10 MHz of spectrum. One solution would be to add base stations. BWA providers useually have a huge advantage. Sprint Nextel, for instance, owns 90 MHz of spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band.

HSDPA is probably fine for bursty applications, but not for mass-scale video.

No comments: