3G White Paper Published

UMTS deployments are well under way and starting later this year, the industry is poised to launch the next evolution of UMTS through 3GPP Release 5 enhancements like HSDPA and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). 3G Americas, a wireless industry group supporting the GSM family of technologies, has published a white-paper covering industry progress towards UMTS Release 6 (Rel'6) and its further long term evolution.

Chris Pearson, President of 3G Americas stated, "With wireless data services starting to follow a similar growth curve to that of wireline data, the GSM community has recently focused on the near term evolution to support HSDPA and IMS through 3GPP Rel'5. Yet, UMTS/HSDPA is not an end point, its future evolution will continue to enhance speed, performance and cost for vendors, carriers and customers."

New Rel'6 features include: E-DCH for providing significant uplink data capacity and throughput improvements; improved minimum performance specifications for support of advanced receivers that will increase downlink capacity and throughput; and MBMS to enable more efficient broadcast and multicast services. Further enhancements (e.g. reduced latency, improvements for real-time services like VoIP, etc.) are well under way in standards through 3GPP Rel'7.

Commenting on the growing momentum of UMTS, Vicki Livingston, 3G Americas' Director of Marketing explained, "In November 2004, there were 53 UMTS networks in commercial service; now, just over six months later, there are nearly 70 commercial UMTS networks in over 30 countries." She added, "As of May 2005, there are more than 24 million UMTS customers and that total is forecast to triple by the end of 2005."

The Global Evolution of UMTS/HSDPA - 3GPP Release 6 and Beyond white paper was collaboratively developed by 3G Americas' board member companies and is available for free download from http://www.3gamericas.org/pdfs/umtsrel6beyond_july2005.pdf"

Posted to the site on 14th July 2005