With 3G and 4G wireless broadband becoming part of the daily mobile lexicon, who has time for pokey old EDGE networks? Nokia Siemens Networks, a wireless equipment maker, does and has come up with a new software solution that doubles the EDGE data speeds.
The new technology, called Nokia Siemens Networks’ Dual Carrier EDGE solution, will double the data speed to up to 592 kbps on existing EDGE-capable GSM networks. It will be available in the third quarter of 2008, and will soon be followed by what NSN calls EGPRS 2, which will result in downlink speeds of up to 1.2 Mbps and will double uplink speed to up to 473 kbps, thus quadrupling the capabilities of EDGE today. Now that means millions of iPhone users can now look forward to a new, faster day, when their devices will get a true taste of speed!
“Now that means millions of iPhone users can now look forward to a new, faster day, when their devices will get a true taste of speed”
Since this will be a software upgrade, that could be true. I’m curious as to the impacts on a true 3G iPhone and the battery life after the upgrade. If this works out, I’m not sure I see the need for a 3G iPhone and my expectation is that we’d see the speed boost but not have the bigger battery drain of today’s 3G radios. Thoughts?
@Kevin: NSN is saying that it will be a software update on the infrastructure side not on the device side 😉 Then this announce is good news for operators because: not too expensive as it is a software upgrade on existing infra, but device manufacturers will have to build new compliant devices.
@ Axel,
especially in a country like India where there are no plans to upgrade to 3G for next 12 months or so. There is clearly an opportunity there.
Hope to get more details on this later today.
@Axel, it would be also interesting if this would allow infrastructures other then Nokia-Siemens to license the technology, but effectively what we would really like to see is an iPhone with HSDPA support really.
@Axel: thanks for the clarification!
@Om: if Axel is correct and it’s a software upgrade on the infrastructure side, why would millions of Apple iPhone owners be affected at all? Sounds like our EDGE iPhones will stay EDGE iPhones, no?
Sounds too good to be true. Will this work on Non – Nokia or Siemens platforms ?
A few things:
1) like all wireless technologies you need to have the same standard on both ends of the link (handset and base-station)
2) software upgradeable only means keep the same radio if the radio is capable of running the new software — this is almost never the case for handsets and seldom the case even for base-station radios (carriers don’t like to admit that they spend money on their networks to wall street, so they go along with this charade)
3) By the name of the technology, it sounds like you need multiple radios dedicated to EDGE to hit the top speeds, this means adding more radios to the site
4) support for higher speeds means better backhaul from the site, something carriers hate to spend money on
5) Each timeslot dedicated to EDGE requires transceiver resources at the base-station controller and these transceivers are damn expensive
To summarize:
1) people with existing EDGE devices will see no benefit from this technology — just like EVDO Rev A did nothing for the tens of millions of EVDO Rev 0 devices out there.
2) there is a good chance carriers won’t even deploy this technology (especially in the US), as aren’t they supposed to be saving their pennies for LTE (there was an upgrade to CDPD that was exactly like this and nobody bit on that because they had already moved on to GSM/GPRS)
Agree with Kopelman there…Also, this is not proprietary to NSN, most vendors out there are coming out with a enhanced EDGE, double EDGE, faster EDGE variants, all utilizing the basic principles of modulation and enhancing them…Nortel apparently had a demo of their enhanced EDGE in the GSM congress earlier this year..
I’m no wireless expert, but I’d imagine that the carriers have the capability to hook up to multiple Edge connections simultaniously, so it would just require a software update to merge two of those edge connection together as “one” connection; but my existing iPhone only has “one” reciever/transmitter and no ability to merge two edge connections.
Thoughts?