Sony Ericsson Showcases Better, Faster 3G Speeds

Sony Ericsson, one of the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile phones, will demonstrate what they claimed to be the fastest 3G wireless performance ever at this week’s CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas.

The company boasts of connection speeds running at 56Mb per second (Mbps) using their 3G High-Speed Packet Access (HSDPA) network connections. This breaks the record set by the same company standing at 42Mbps demonstrated at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February.

This is actually a surprising development as most carriers using 3G are planning to migrate and utilize to what they call as 4G technology. LTE or Long-Term Evolution, which is also what 4G is supposed to be, will not be offered until next year. This would probably mean that this super-fast 3G developed by SE will be utilized for only a few months. Well, for areas that can’t directly transition to 4G, this 3G speed is great news, but for those who does transition, this news is irrelevant.

LTE vendors have claimed speeds around 100Mbps downstream, but as shown by Ericsson’s new claim, it’s clear that HSDPA hasn’t yet run out of steam.

Ericsson reached the new high speed using a combination of MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) technology, which uses more than one antenna, and multicarrier operation, which uses more than one adjacent frequency band. It will demonstrate this achievement using a router that connects to the Internet via 3G and can provide a connection for several users. That device is not a production product but a design concept.

HSPA with multi-carrier and MIMO is being standardized and should be commercially available next year, according to Ericsson. In addition to greater speed, MIMO offers greater spectral efficiency, meaning more customers can be served with a given amount of radio spectrum. The 42Mbps technology demonstrated in Barcelona, which used a multicarrier system, will be set for commercial deployment this year, the company said.