The next mobile arms race: EV-DV and HSDPA standards accelerate as competitive stakes are raised


Two new high-speed wireless standards, each with "desktop-like" throughput speeds, are beginning to draw attention from wireless carriers eager to fine tune their wireless data migration strategies.
The two standards--CDMA-EV-DV and HSDPA (high speed downlink packet access)--were viewed at the recent CTIA, Wireless 2004 show in Atlanta as technologies that will eventually see commercialization. The question no carrier is yet willing to answer is--when?
Both Samsung and Ericsson vied for top billing on EV-DV by separately announcing development of products that support the standard, which is considered a step beyond CDMA-EVDO because it supports concurrent voice and data traffic on the same channel. EV-DO, the standard preferred by Verizon Wireless, demands a single channel for data-only traffic.

CONTRACT AWAITS
SprintPCS has indicated it will pursue an EV-DV contract in the future, but has not indicated which equipment maker will win the business. Nokia announced an alliance last year with Texas Instruments to develop EV-DV solutions.
The product offerings described at CTIA do differ. Samsung, which emphasized actual availability of its product, is selling a base transceiver station and base station controller built around EV-DV, revision C, as specified by the international wireless standards body, the 3GPP2. This revision supports 3.1Mbps on the forward link and 384Kbps on the reverse link.
"Currently Samsung is the only wireless manufacturer than can offer EV-DV, several years ahead of the competition, states a Samsung press release.
Ericsson, on the other hand, demonstrated EV-DV, revision D, which supports 3.1Mbps on the forward link, and 1.8Mbps on the reverse link. The revision D standard was only finalized in February. Ericsson noted at CTIA that it is working with Qualcomm on development of EV-DV chipsets.
Many industry sources indicate that the recent decision by Verizon Wireless to roll out EV-DO technology is putting increased pressure on U.S. rivals to keep pace. The EV-DO standard supports wireless speeds of between 300 and 500Kbps, with bursts of up to 2.4 Mbps. EV-DO supporters say performance is far superior to that of CDMA-1x or the EDGE standard, the fastest technology currently utilized by Cingular, AT&T and T-Mobile.
A number of sources indicated that Cingular Wireless is intensely interested in the 3.5G technology, HSDPA, which promises data downlink speeds surpassing 10Mbps and is backwards-compatible with EDGE. The standard is also noteworthy for supplying maximum available bandwidth to the end-user.
"It's what our customers say they need," says Robert Capps, vice president, sales and business development at Siemens. "We have a hugely competitive market that's changing, and the idea of higher speeds and better bandwidth is very appealing." Siemens told America's Network that it is developing HSDPA solutions, both for base stations and end-user devices.
Lucent executives say the company plans to make HSDPA available for customer trials later this year.
In fact, the supplier demonstrated an HSDPA prototype system at the CTIA show, where high-quality video streams were transmitted to a pair of mobile devices.