Ralph de la Vega has some aggressive plans for the coming years as mobility chief and CEO of At&t. In the Morgan Stanley annual Communications Conference he announced that the company will make their 3g network support download speeds five times faster than current by 2009. Based on the current maximum speeds this would mean that At&t’s HSPA 3g network would be capable (theoretical) of 20Mbps within the next two years. With most cable companies peaking at 10Mbps in the US for their download speeds, a 20Mbps wireless connection over 3g compliments of HSPA would be amazing.
According to Ralph de la Vega, the company has begun testing HSPA 3g networking in their labs and has been able to deliver download speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps. This is twice the speed of the current network, but nearly 1/3 of the promised 20Mbps. The biggest problem here is that current HSPA standards only support download speeds of 14.4 Mbps, so either Ralph de la Vega knows something we don’t or a new protocol is going to be established. We believe that it will be a 3g mobile data protocol defined in 3GPP release 7 which is capable of data rates of 42 Mbps downlink and 22 Mbps uplink.
The best part of this entire announcement is that the upgrade to At&t’s network will not require major hardware modifications of cell towers and instead will be accomplished mostly by upgrading software on existing electronics. Keep in mind that At&t has another 4g roadmap in store for customers which brings LTE (Long Term Evolution) to the US by 2010, so there is not much time between the 20Mbps HSPA launching and 4g LTE.
With 4g LTE, de la Vega says that using the 700Mhz spectrum and LTE will bring download speeds to five times their 20Mbps HSPA goal. That’s right, 100 Mbps is the expectation for 4g LTE brought to you by Ralph de la Vega from At&t. Here is a short section from Ralph de la Vega’s announcements at Morgan Stanley Annual Communications Conference:
The steps to get there are very logical and they’re all building on the same GSM technology that we’ve been using for a while. LTE will allow for backwards compatibility to GSM and HSPA, which is a great benefit to customers. And our path forward to LTE allows us to get there step-by-step, with interim steps that will deliver more and more speeds everyday.
In other next generation news today, Alltel Wireless announced that they would also be moving towards LTE (Long Term Evolution) for their 4g network in the future. This brings the US total up to 3 carriers for LTE; Verizon Wireless, At&t, Alltel Wireless and WiMAX is held only by Sprint/Nextel.
