NTT DoCoMo boasts of plans for 300Mbps mobile speeds

Stuart Corner
Monday, 16 July 2007 05:03

Opinion and Analysis

In the absence of more detail from DoCoMo, analysts have been trying to read between the lines of the announcement. Heavy Reading senior analyst Patrick Donegan was reported saying he believed DoCoMo would be among the first to adopt LTE commercially. "The materials DoCoMo has released with this announcement references HSDPA supporting only 14.4Mbps in the downlink whereas 3GPP is evolving Enhanced HSDPA to go to 40Mbps in the downlink and potentially beyond that as well. This suggests that DoCoMo may have a relatively short life cycle in mind for HSDPA, with a view to being among the first to commercialise UTRAN LTE."

What DoCoMo is planning however seems to be something between the current HDPA technologies and LTE. It describes Super 3G as "a highly advanced version of High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA), which have been evolved from W-CDMA packet transmission technologies standardised by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)."

DoCoMo adds "The 3GPP...is currently discussing standardisation of Super 3G under the name LTE. On the basis what DoCoMo has said it seems to me it is not putting too much faith in the LTE timetable and looking to some interim solution with a view to implementing LTE at later date when it is sufficiently mature and able to deliver the data rates DoCoMo clearly believes it will need in a few years time.