Working on LTE lines, T-Mobile USA and Nokia Siemens Networks are pushing for Long Term HSPA Evolution to achive speeds of more than 650 Mbps.

T-Mobile USA and Nokia Siemens Networks are aiming to make it available for commercial deployment by 2013. The proposed key features of Long Term HSPA Evolution were accepted during the plenary meeting of 3GPP RAN held on 7-10 December, 2010.

The plenary meeting of 3GPP RAN initiated technical work and study items on the following features for Long Term HSPA Evolution:

• HSDPA Multicarrier evolution: Combines up to eight carriers and provides peak data rates of up to 672 Mbps along with improving spectrum utilization. To overcome operators’ spectrum fragmentation constraints, HSDPA carrier aggregation enables carriers from more than one frequency band to be combined.
• HSDPA Multipoint transmission: Significantly increases the cell edge data rate by coordinating and combining signals from multiple antennas.
• Dual antenna beamforming and MIMO in uplink: Improves the uplink performance with dual-antenna transmission, doubling the uplink peak data rate and improving the user average data rate by 30% with 2x2 MIMO/ beam forming. With 2x4 MIMO, over 100% increase in average user data rates can be achieved due to beam forming gain and four receive antennas in the base station.

The detailed specification work to deliver these features will take place in RAN working groups. Other Long Term HSPA Evolution features are expected to be considered in subsequent 3GPP meetings.

The demand for higher data rates and mobile broadband growth continues to push the need for advances in both HSPA and LTE technologies, says Keith Sutton, head of the WCDMA business line for Nokia Siemens Networks. 

Both T-Mobile USA, Nokia Siemens Networks have called for continued HSPA evolution in parallel to the further development of LTE and LTE Advanced.