T-Mobile USA is bringing faster mobile broadband to 10 new towns and cities and promises that 140 million Americans in over 25 markets will get its 42Mbit/s update by mid-year.

The operator said Tuesday that it has switched on 21Mbit/s High-Speed Packet Access Plus (HSPA+) services, which it sells as “4G,” in 10 new markets. These include Ames, Iowa; Anderson, Indiana; Battle Creek, Benton Harbor and Jackson, Michigan; Fort Collins-Loveland, Colorado; Lawrence and Manhattan, Kansas; Springfield, Illinois; and Wichita Falls, Texas.

Overall, the operator says that it now has the faster network capability in 167 cities and towns across the U.S., covering more than 200 million people in total. You can see a full list of coverage areas here.

Additionally, in 2011, T-Mobile is doubling the speed of its HSPA+ network to achieve a theoretical download speed of 42 Mbit/s. Users in Las Vegas, New York and Orlando, Fla., are the first to get the “HSPA+ 42″ update. Chicago and a further expansion of the New York network into Long Island, N.Y., and Northern New Jersey will follow. By mid-year, T-Mobile expects more than 140 million Americans in over 25 markets to have access to these increased 4G speeds.

T-Mobile says that its “original 4G phones” showed average download speeds approaching 5 Mbit/s in some cities and peak speeds of nearly 12 Mbit/s on the 21Mbit/s upgrade. The 42Mbit/s upgrade should increase those averages with suitable devices.

Why this matters
T-Mobile’s HSPA+ deployment is one of the indicators of where AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) might start to deploy LTE using T-Mobile’s 1700MHz AWS spectrum, if it wins its US$39 billion bid for the smaller operator. T-Mobile has so far been deploying HSPA+ in the areas where it has the backhaul capabilities in place to support the faster uploads and downloads, which can cause bottlenecks at the connections that link the towers to the wired Internet.

While mobile telecom carriers around the world have been troubled about much faster growing mobile Internet-access traffic than the corresponding increase in revenues due to existing charge rates without use limits, the service upgrade to HSPA+ or LTE (Long Term Evolution) is an occasion for mitigating the imbalance between online traffic and revenues through a progressive price scheme with charge rates depending on bandwidth, total use volume in a time period, time of surfing (peak and off-peak hours), etc., according to telecom equipment makers in Taiwan.

Main mobile telecom carriers around the world had their total mobile Internet-access traffic in the fourth quarter of 2009 23.34 times the total volume in the fourth quarter of 2007, while the corresponding total revenues increased by only 90%, the sources cited statistics by UK-based Ofcom as indicating.

Many mobile telecom carriers plan to upgrade their services from 3.5G at download speeds of 7.2-14.4Mbps to HSPA+ at 21Mbps or above and hope to offer progressive charge rates along with the upgrade, the sources pointed out.

A total of 127 mobile telecom carriers in 59 countries have set up or are setting up HSPA+ networks and 73 carriers in 41 countries of which have begun commercial operations, the sources cited statistics by the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) as indicating. The number of HSPA+ commercial operators will increase to 100 at the end of 2010 and at least five operators will have offered 42Mbps services then, the sources cited GSA as noting.

Taiwan 3G mobile telecom carrier Vibo is upgrading its core network from the existing 3G equipment supplied by Ericsson to HSPA+ (3.75G) equipment supplied by Nokia Siemens Networks, with completion scheduled for November 2010. The maximum download speed for mobile access to the Internet is expected to be hiked from 7.2Mbps at present to 21.1Mbps, according to company president Chang Feng-hsiung.

In line with the upgrade in mobile Internet-access speeds, Vibo will offer vPad, a own-brand Android 2.2-based 7-inch tablet PC at a market price of up to NT$10,000 (US$314), for contract-bundled sale in November, Chang pointed out. Vibo plans to procure 2,000 vPads initially and hopes to sell them by the end of 2010, Chang indicated. In addition, Vibo will offer own-brand Android-based smartphones worth about NT$5,000 for contract-bundled sale as well by the end of 2010, Chang indicated.

Including replacement of 3G base stations with HSPA+ ones and additions of the latter, the entire HSPA+ network will be completed in 2011 and Vibo expects the number of subscribers to increase from 1.75 million currently to 2.5 million by the end of 2011, Chang pointed out.

The new hardware won’t be in service for another three to six months, Ericsson says
By Mikael Ricknäs | IDG News Service

Ericsson has demonstrated one part of the technology that will make speeds of up to 42 Mbps (bits per second) possible in 3G networks. However, a lot of work remains before services can be launched.

The technology that will make the higher speed possible is HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) Evolution, also known as HSPA+ or Evolved HSPA.

Ericsson demonstrated the technology by connecting one of its radio base stations via a cable to a prototype mobile chipset from Qualcomm, which will be used in future modems. The company hopes to have an over-the-air demonstration ready for the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona in February, and the first services should become available in three to six months, according to Frank Muller, product manager at Ericsson.

Today, HSPA offers a theoretical maximum download speed of 21 Mbps, although users will see lower speeds in practice. About 10 percent of operators who support HSPA have so far upgraded to 21 Mbps, according to statistics from the Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA).

To double the capacity to 42 Mbps, HSPA Evolution sends data over two carrier frequencies, compared to one for existing networks. The carriers use 5 MHz of spectrum each and they are located next to each other, according to Ericsson. To take advantage of the higher speed, operators will have to upgrade the software in their base stations, and users will need a new modem.

There are other ways to increase HSPA capacity: three networks are using MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) with multiple antennas in each phone and base station to offer theoretical download speeds of up to 28 Mbps, the GSA said.

Representatives from Vodafone and the Australian operator Telstra visited Stockholm to view Ericsson’s demonstration. The two operators will likely be the first to roll out the technology in their networks. When Ericsson rolls out a new technology it first works closely with a couple of operators, and then makes the technology generally available, the company said.

The upgrade to 42 Mbps isn’t the end of the line for 3G networks. Work has already started on support for 84 Mbps and 168 Mbps systems, Muller said.

The demo comes in the same week as Swedish mobile operator TeliaSonera launched the first commercial LTE (Long-Term Evolution) mobile services, which could attain speeds of 80 Mbps.

HSPA and LTE won’t compete, but will work in symbiosis, according to Bengt Nordström, CEO at market research company Northstream. LTE is still in its infancy, and operators who roll out the technology will have to depend on HSPA as a back-up, according to Nordström. The success of HSPA will drive the need for LTE, he said.

Just as with LTE, it will take time for HSPA at 42 Mbps to take off on a larger scale. Next year, the 21-Mbps version will become more common, and we’ll also see the first smartphones that support the speed, according to Nordström.

BendBroadband, a Bend, Ore.-based cable operator, this morning launched a next-generation wireless broadband network that uses HSPA+ technology, thus becoming the first company in the U.S. to do so. T-Mobile USA has a trial network up and running in Philadelphia, though it has yet to launch a commercial service.

HSPA+ is an upgrade to the current generation of 3G technologies and is also known as Evolved HSPA. It can provide downstream connectivity of up to 56 megabits per second (Mbps) and upstream connections of 22 Mbps.

BendBroadband can offer connections of up to 15 Mbps to its customers, though in reality they’ll typically get closer to 6-8 Mbps. The small, family-owned cable company can also now offer broadband and voice services to residents of certain rural communities. The broadband connections will come in two flavors — fixed and mobile — and will cost anywhere from $20-$80 a month.

BendBroadband may be the first to formally launch a wireless broadband service using HSPA+ technology, but it seems several small (and large) players are interested in going down this same route. This is a good, cheap way for them to extend their broadband footprints, without doing expensive co-ax cable buildouts in less populated areas. The U.S. government recently began accepting applications for stimulus funds aimed at boosting broadband, and as Stacey reported, the less populated areas and small independent carriers were expected to be the big winners of the government largesse.

Another big backer of HSPA+ in the U.S. is T-Mobile USA. Back in May, T-Mobile CTO Cole Brodman told me that “in 2010, you’re going to see us start to integrate HSPA+ into our network.

[With] HSPA+, I think you’ll see the ability to see peaks that are three to five times that. A lot of it at that point will start to come down to device capability. I don’t think you’ll see that capability in a smartphone, but I think it’s very possible to see it in a data stick and maybe a netbook that has the chip architecture and the memory to support it. In the future, we’ll see rates that are even greater than that, but I think that’s beyond 2010.

T-Mobile is in a mortal combat with AT&T, Verizon and Sprint to attract big-spending data customers. The company has bet big on Android and now needs a faster, more capable network in order to compete against its bigger rivals.

LONDON — Wireless chip company ST-Ericsson NV (Geneva, Switzerland) has demonstrated handover between LTE and HSPA networks using multimode LTE/HSPA silicon. The interoperability was realized in live networks belonging to Ericsson in Stockholm, Sweden, using multimode equipment powered by ST-Ericsson’s M710 platform.
The chipset used within ST-Ericsson’s M710 platform is commercially available and the handset and network equipment used in the Stockholm test met the 3GPP Release 8 March standard.

“With multimode devices consumers can enjoy new high-speed mobile broadband services and global coverage right from the launch of LTE services,” said.

“Seamless roaming between LTE and today’s networks is a key device capability to enable faster introduction of LTE,” said Joergen Lantto, chief technology officer of ST-Ericsson, in a statement.

“Ericsson is in the lead of the LTE development and together with the rest of the industry we will provide a true ecosystem for mobile broadband,” said Ulf Ewaldsson, head of product area radio at Ericsson, in the same statement.

Sources from China Telecom and the China Telecom Guangzhou Research Institute said after completing the EV-DO Rev. B lab tests, China Telecom has begun to conduct EV-DO Rev. B field tests in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu. The sources also emphasized that China Telecom will actively upgrade EV-DO Rev. B based on the progress of China Unicom’s HSPA+ update over the next two quarters, which is a bid to maintain a constant advantage in its 3G networks. Reportedly, ZTE, Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent participated in China Telecom’s EV-DO Rev. B field tests. According to previous reports, China Telecom Sichuan branch will complete the upgrade to EV-DO Rev. B in select areas at the end of this year.