Thursday 23rd September 2004 10:47AM http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/63711/ericsson-beyond3g-applications-to-penetrate-global-market-in-2014.html Beyond-3G mobile communications standards will be finalised by the end of 2007, and deployments of beyond-3G will emerge in a wide range of applications by 2014, according to Hakan Eriksson, senior VP and general manager of the research and development division and chief technology officer at Ericsson. Beyond-3G technology will see increases from 3G's current speeds of 10Mbit/sec to 100Mbit/sec, said Eriksson. Germany-based WINNER (Wireless world Initiative New Radio), Japan-based mITF (mobile Internet Technical Forum), the WWRF (Wireless World Research Forum) and ITU (International Telecom Union) have all begun developing individual beyond-3G projects, Eriksson said. HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), an upgrade for WCDMA 3G networks, offers maximum data transfer rates of 14Mbps, up from 2Mbps at present, according to Bjorn Olsson, executive vice president and general manager for the business unit systems division at Ericsson. Ericsson has begun testing the technology with its clients, said Olsson, adding that telecom carriers in Europe, North America and China will start deploying HSDPA-enabled networks in the second half of next year. One-third of global GSM networks are migrating towards 3G, according to Carl-Henric Svanberg, president and CEO of Ericsson, at the Strategy & Technology Summit, a seminar held in Hong Kong yesterday. There is aggressive deployment of 3G technologies in Australia, Japan and Europe this year, and there will be in the US in 2005 and in China in 2006, Svanberg anticipated. Ericsson currently holds a 35 per cent share of the global GSM/WCDMA network-equipment market, 50 per cent of the MMS (multimedia messaging service) market and 20 per cent of the soft-switch market, Svanberg said. Max Wang, Jessie Shen, DigiTimes.com |