Eighty percent of AT&T’s mobile network has been upgraded to HSPA+, CTO John Donovan told an audience of developers at the Sencha Conference in San Francisco Tuesday. The carrier is upgrading the backhaul from its cell sites to Ethernet on fiber links as well. The upgrade should offer two or two-and-a-half times the performance of HSPA 7.2, AT&T’s current top-end cellular technology. Recently introduced USB modems that can use HSPA+ as well as LTE. Unfortunately, the iPhone doesn’t support HSPA+ service.
The volume of mobile data traffic grew from just over 1 billion megabytes in the third quarter of 2007 to about 30.3 billion megabytes in the third quarter of this year, said Donovan.
Last week, T-Mobile’s myTouch 4G and T-Mobile’s first 4G netbook, the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 4G became available nation-wide last week.
T-Mobile claims typical download speeds on par with or faster than competing 4G technologies, with service availability in 75 metropolitan markets throughout the United States.
The T-Mobile G2 was the first smartphone specifically designed for T-Mobile’s new HSPA+ network. AT&T’s smartphones to not yet support the faster network.
Today AT&T and Novatel Wireless have announced the MiFi 2372, complete with the new MiFi OS, widgets and application support. Novatel’s MiFi 2372 features up to 7.2Mbps download speeds, a built in microSDHC slot (up to 32GB), GPS-capabilities and will be the first in North America to support applications via the MiFi OS. Beginning November 21, the AT&T Mobile Hotspot will be available at AT&T company-owned stores nationwide or online for $49.99 after $100 mail-in rebate (pay $149.99 and after mail-in rebate receive $100 AT&T Promotion Card). Early Termination Fee is $325, however.
According to AT&T, the company is currently rolling out a system that is faster than HSPA+ 14.4 because it uses 64 QAM modulation. The slower HSPA+ 14.4 system uses 16 QAM modulation. So far, AT&T has only said that it will deploy the earlier 14.4Mbit/s upgrade by the end of this year, revealing nothing about a 21Mbit/s upgrade in 2011, notes Light Reading.
By contrast, T-Mobile plans to cover 100 markets and 200 million POPs with a 21Mbit/s HSPA+ upgrade for 100 cities by year-end, reports Fierce Wireless. The average download speeds on 21Mbit/s HSPA+ are reportedly in the 5 to 8 Mbit/s range, similar to “4G” speeds offered by Clear’s WiMAX.
Part of what is driving data growth, says Donovan, is the growing popularity of “integrated devices,” which AT&T defines as handsets with QWERTY keyboards and voice capability, typically smartphones. Today, 57 percent of AT&T’s postpaid subscribers have integrated devices, up from 23.3 percent in 2008, he said.
AT&T expects to cover 250 million POPs with HSPA+ by year-end and plans to launch LTE service by the middle of next year, covering 70-75 million POPs with LTE by the end of 2011.
Donovan also talked up ISIS, the partnership AT&T struck with fellow carriers T-Mobile and Verizon to bring payments to the mobile space. Donovan said that ISIS would also include loyalty programs and other technologies, “everything in your wallet”.
HSPA+ uses multiple radios with MIMO for improved speeds. As of November 2009, there were 20 HSPA+ networks running in the world at 21 Mbit/s with two are running at 28 Mbit/s. The first to launch was Telstra in Australia in late 2008, with access in February 2009 to speeds up to 21 Mbit/s.
