Upgrading to HSDPA is 90% Software and the Other Half is Hardware

The GSM world is looking to HSDPA to increase downlink cellular bandwidth, first because of the high data rates required to transfer advanced multimedia to the handset, and also because HSDPA reduces the cost/megabyte of transmission to less than half that of 3G WCDMA. There is one more reason, which is competitive: the CDMA world already offers close to 1Mbps through EV-DO, and it could reach 3.1Mbps with the Rev A version.

How easy will the upgrade to HSDPA be? The conventional wisdom is that it's just an easy software update. There is some truth to this: 3G infrastructure installed since 2002 was designed with HSDPA in mind and therefore will be software-upgradeable.

But according to ABI Research's principal analyst of semiconductor research, Alan Varghese, "Just like Yogi's logic on baseball, the transition to HSDPA will require more than just software at the base station." Some infrastructure will require hardware additions such as channel cards, traffic processing units and backplane modifications to handle the increased capacity and throughput of HSDPA.

And the client side is definitely more than just software. Hardware in the form of advanced baseband chipsets will be required to handle the high data throughput while consuming little power; diversity receive circuitry may be required to handle the 16-QAM of HSDPA; and increased handset memory will also be needed. Lastly, as a reminder, EDGE was supposed to be an easy software upgrade from GSM/GPRS, but it still took the industry a couple of years to sort through all the issues with testing, interoperability with different vendors, and roaming to other cellular protocols."

Posted to the site on 29th June 2005