The Telecoms.com Podcast: InterDigital, 6G and the Twitter Files

Mike Ferris 02/02/2023 @ 10:50 am

Great pod as always. I was thinking about the comment on how poor the user experience is on HSPA these days and why that might be. It’s not like there’s a high proportion of users on it now, so theoretically it should be quite good, within the limits of a single carrier. Of course in the latter days before rollout of 4G, you could get a dual carrier service with HSPA, that almost doubled the data rate, and that’s gone now due to spectrum re-farming. However, I think the biggest factor is that these days the experience of HSPA is always a cell edge experience, because you’re beyond the coverage of 4G but hanging onto 3G coverage, and that’s probably down to 5MHz carrier on HSPA vs 20MHz carrier on 4G, which is a more difficult link budget, despite being a lower frequency. Your memory of the good old days of HSPA is based on typically decent radio conditions, because there was no 4G. You can test this theory by manually selecting 3G (if your phone lets you) and seeing if HSPA then gives the reasonable experience you’d expect. Latest iOS doesn’t give you 3G choice but older ones do. Not sure about Android.

3 comments

Mike Ferris 02/02/2023 @ 10:50 am


Great pod as always. I was thinking about the comment on how poor the user experience is on HSPA these days and why that might be. It’s not like there’s a high proportion of users on it now, so theoretically it should be quite good, within the limits of a single carrier. Of course in the latter days before rollout of 4G, you could get a dual carrier service with HSPA, that almost doubled the data rate, and that’s gone now due to spectrum re-farming. However, I think the biggest factor is that these days the experience of HSPA is always a cell edge experience, because you’re beyond the coverage of 4G but hanging onto 3G coverage, and that’s probably down to 5MHz carrier on HSPA vs 20MHz carrier on 4G, which is a more difficult link budget, despite being a lower frequency. Your memory of the good old days of HSPA is based on typically decent radio conditions, because there was no 4G. You can test this theory by manually selecting 3G (if your phone lets you) and seeing if HSPA then gives the reasonable experience you’d expect. Latest iOS doesn’t give you 3G choice but older ones do. Not sure about Android.
- Scott Bicheno 03/02/2023 @ 9:18 am
  
  
  Thanks a lot Mike, that makes sense.
Neil McRae 22/02/2023 @ 3:13 pm


Yup that’s right all operators have been pruning 3G spectrum – but in reality it should really be turned off completely now – it’s a huge platform burning lots of energy.