[Ben]

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/3ggprs/0,39020339,39275177,00.htm

Ah the old chestnut. HSDPA vs WiMax... Who will survive! Well, whilst this subject has been done to its death already and we are still yet to see either technology widely available, the article is worth reading anyway. Not really.

A clip:

According to forecasts released by Ovum on Thursday, there will be 16.5 million High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) users in Western Europe by the end of 2008, with 50 million by the end of the decade.

"Until [the end of 2008], HSDPA will remain a data card market for enterprises," said Grivolas on Thursday, adding: "In the initial stages, operators will focus their launches on business use through laptops via data cards."

HSDPA will allow mobile operators to offer much faster connection speeds than standard 3G. Grivolas said the main reason for the high predicted uptake was that HSDPA reuses the spectrum already used for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), the base technology for 3G as it currently exists. For the operators, rolling out HSDPA requires little more than a software upgrade.

Grivolas also suggested that HSDPA’s fast development would have "a considerable impact on the success of alternative broadband wireless technologies such as mobile WiMax".

"In areas where HSDPA becomes widely available, like Western Europe, and where well-suited spectrum for 802.16e [mobile WiMax] is rare, the window of opportunity for mobile WiMax will be quite limited," he said.

[Hands0n]

These pair of technolgies both have their place, I would contend. They are, however, somewhat mutually exclusive. I can see them both being used, but for differing purposes.



WiMAX is a standards-based wireless technology that provides high-throughput broadband connections over long distances. WiMAX can be used for a number of applications, including "last mile" broadband connections, hotspots and cellular backhaul, and high-speed enterprise connectivity for business.

Source: http://www.intel.com/netcomms/technologies/wimax/




HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) marks a similar boost for WCDMA that EDGE does for GSM. It provides a two-fold increase in air interface capacity and a five-fold increase in data speeds in the downlink direction. HSDPA also shortens the round-trip time between the network and terminals and reduces variance in downlink transmission delay.

Source: http://www.nokia.com/A4126518


I believe that we are going to see HSDPA out of the gate before WiMAX purely for the reason that these [claimed] 16.5 million users will have 3G mobile phones in their pockets or data cards in their PCs (or integrated into their PCs as per Dell). The service will run over existing infrastructure, subject to upgrades as per the article.

WiMAX is going to require a wholesale build out across the nation to even begin to operate on the scale of mobile telephone networks. But it seems to me that we will see it in its other [back end] uses such as described above by Nokia.

For sure, I believe, we will see both technologies but not necessarily competing against eachother.