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Wednesday May 27, 2009
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We've known it's coming for ages now, but AT&T today officially announced they're rolling out HSDPA 7.2, the latest version of their 3G network. HSDPA 7.2 should double AT&T's effective 3G download speeds.
According to AT&T, the network upgrades will start later this year and be completed in 2011. AT&T isn't promising any specific real-life speeds, but they'll presumably be about double what we're getting today with AT&T's HSDPA 3.6 devices.
The only problem there is, in our tests we've gotten wildly varying speeds with HSDPA 3.6 devices - anywhere from about 400 kbps up to 1.6 mbps downstream, with speeds heavily affected by what metro area we were testing in. So the only thing we can promise with HSDPA 7.2 is, speeds will be better than they are now.
HSDPA 7.2 is just one of several steps AT&T has going forwards. AT&T is moving more of their valuable 850 Mhz spectrum to 3G, which will dramatically improve capacity in pinched cities like New York. They're deploying 2,100 new cell sites and adding more bandwidth at the sites themselves, which should also expand coverage. And they're testing 3G microcells, which will let people put tiny cell sites in their homes and offices.
From HSDPA 7.2, AT&T can then go to HSDPA 14.4 - already implemented in some countries - and they're also looking at LTE, a truly next-generation network they've said they'll start rolling out in 2011.
Right now, the only AT&T devices to support HSDPA 7.2 are their Mercury and Quicksilver broadband USB modems for PCs. But 7.2 has appeared on many European and Asian phones already, so it won't be hard to build it into new phones once AT&T starts requesting the capability.
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August 16, 2009 3:18 PM
This is a better map of 850: http://www.gsmworld.com/cgi-bin/ni_map.pl?cc=us&net=b2
@Matthew