UK mobile operators T-Mobile, 3 and Vodafone have confirmed plans to begin rolling out the High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) standard in the UK by the end of the year.
The technology – which uses packet scheduling – takes the performance enhancements found in the High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) standard and brings them to the upload side of a data connection. The net effect is a balancing of the theoretical maximum upload and download speeds.
Vodafone have already launched the technology in Germany, and will begin rolling out their UK service later this year. Rivals T-Mobile and 3 will also be aiming to start upgrading their network by the end of the year, with Orange planning to introduce the HSUPA service in 2008.
The only UK operator not figuring in these plans is O2 – who have at present not announced plans for HSPA enhancements to their network.
(Thanks to SMS Text News reader Mike for providing additional information to correct this article)
[…] Text News reports that UK mobile operators T-Mobile, 3 and Vodafone have confirmed plans to begin rolling out High […]
Er…some sub-editing needed here Ewan 😉
HSUPA is an addition to the UMTS HSPA standard, enabled in 3GPP Release 6. It is in the same family, on the same roadmap, and isn’t a separate, new thing.
What it does is enable the same Upload performance enhancements due to packet scheduling that HSDPA delivered to downloads. So it’s just the uplink side catching up with the downlink side. You’ll see much better upload speeds, streaming from handsets to the net, etc.
Category 4 HSUPA allows for up to 2Mbps theoretical maximum upload.
Let’s keep it real by using ‘3.5G’ as the general term for HSPA technologies. Salesmen love the ‘super’ ephitet, but it just confuses the hell of most people. Also, your N95 will display ‘3.5G’ when using HSPA, so it will become common parlance shortly anyway.
Cheers,
Mike
Mine already does…
🙂
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Mike (comment 2): hear, hear!
Can this article PLEASE be re-edited?
It reads like the person thinks they know what they were writing about, but that they jumped to the wrong conclusion.
…and then all the trackbacks are also jumping to the wrong conclusion!
The author’s responsibility is to ensure the timeliness and accuracy of news. One out of two isn’t good enough.
Mike (and Ben), article edited. Thanks for the info – somewhere along the line something got lost in an article further up the chain, and it’s just filtered down like chinese whispers until it’s totally wrong.
That’ll teach me for writing blog entries for weekend scheduling at silly times of the morning 🙂
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[…] Speed Uplink Packet Access) protocols. It seems the Brits got it right on this one. According to SMS Text News, UK GSM carriers Vodafone, 3, and T-mobile have confirmed plans to complement their HSDPA 3G […]
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