ALCATEL and Fujitsu have announced the joint launch and operation of a live HSDPA demonstration system in France. This system, which was developed by Fujitsu based on technical specifications provided by NTT DoCoMo is located at Alcatel’s 3G Reality Centre (3GRC) in Velizy, France.
DoCoMo already has a Fujitsu HSDPA demonstrator up and running in Japan.
Mr. Takanori Utano, Executive Vice President and Managing Director of Research and Development Division of NTT DoCoMo, Inc., declared: “We are very happy that a live HSDPA demonstration system in Europe has been made possible, thanks to our collaborative work with Fujitsu and with the local support of Alcatel.”
“Positioned correctly HSDPA will further improve the success of 3G, delivering increased capability necessary to accommodate the market uptake of high-speed mobile applications such as content downloads,” said Jason Chapman, Principal Analyst, Mobile Infrastructure at Gartner. “Gartner expects the first commercial launches of HSDPA to be driven by activity in Japanese market”.
HSDPA: The HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) standard marks a similar leap forward for W-CDMA and UMTS as EDGE does for GSM in terms of data transmission speed and capacity, essential for 3G evolution. The Alcatel-Fujitsu HSDPA demonstrator will give European operators a “hands-on” opportunity to assess HSDPA’s performance and potential. Current field-proven 3G downlink speeds of about 384Kbps (up to 2Mbps possible according to standards) will be boosted to 14Mbps (maximum value according to standards) with the first-generation HSDPA systems, enabling operators to support a considerably larger number of high data-rate users on a single radio carrier and ensure data-hungry subscribers get the best experience with innovative and existing multimedia services.