The jury is still out on the economics of HSDPA services

Stuart Corner
Friday, 13 July 2007 09:32

Opinion and Analysis

"WCDMA HSPA is expected to represent around 45 percent of total WCDMA cellular connections, which are also on track to exceed GSM connections by 2010 in those countries where the network has been launched.

The comment on costs is particularly interesting: "WCDMA HSPA is a software upgrade to the existing WCDMA network infrastructure and is therefore not particularly costly except for backhaul." Also: "WCDMA HSPA will generally be implemented over the whole WCDMA network of an operator, starting with the most densely populated zones."

Wireless intelligence contends that "WCDMA HSPA will go through a slow adoption phase until the end of 2008. There is still a lack of affordable devices, WCDMA coverage is still improving and services are only targeted at the mid to high end of the market."

However if its forecast that WCDMA HSPA cellular connections are expected to reach 40 million worldwide by end of 2008, " there should be plenty of low cost devices to choose from.

I think the jury will be out for a while yet on how HSDPA will stack up against WiMAX, especially in rural areas where there is unlikely to be more demand than available spectrum can support.