CDMA2000 to offer 73 Mbps downloads in 2008

The CDMA Development Group, an industry organization promoting the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) cell phone standard, said Wednesday a new revision to the standard, which could lead to a big jump in cellular download rates in as little as two years, is on track to be published early next year.

CDMA2000 EV-DO Revision B, as the revised standard is known, specifies a download speed, from the network to the terminal, of up to 73.5 Mbps (bits per second) and an upload speed of 27 Mbps, the group said in a statement issued to coincide with the 3G World Congress. The event opened on Monday in Hong Kong.

Today's EV-DO networks generally support downloads of around 2.4 Mbps and an upgrade scheduled to come into use next year, called Revision A, pushes this to 3.1 Mbps downstream from the network. Like existing upgrades, the Revision B standard maintains backwards compatibility so existing handsets will work on the upgraded network, albeit without the big improvement in speed.

The faster downloads offered by Revision B will be possible because the network will support the combining of multiple data carriers over a wide bandwidth -- effectively tying together up to 15 slower channels to get one faster channel.

The higher speed will benefit other applications where latency is sometimes an issue, including voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), push-to-talk over cellular, video telephony, concurrent voice and multimedia and massive multiplayer online gaming, the statement said.

Carriers are expected to start deploying Revision A networks in early 2006 and Revision B networks in 2008, the group said.

There are currently around 200 million subscribers on CDMA2000 networks around the world, according to figures released earlier this month from the CDMA Development Group. The standard is in use by 131 operators. Among these there are 24 networks based on the EV-DO standard, collectively supporting about 18 million subscribers, the group said.

The main competitor to the standard is WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access), a 3G standard favored by many operators currently running GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) networks. Most WCDMA networks currently support downloads of up to 384k bps but upgrades to the technology are planned. HSDPA (high speed downlink packet access) technology will enable downloads of between 10 Mbps and 20 Mbps and some carriers are planning to launch the system next year.

The 3GPP (3G Partnership Project), the group behind WCDMA, is also looking at a technology dubbed "Super 3G" that could offer download speeds of up to 100 Mbps as a stop-gap before 4G mobile systems begin appearing early in the next decade.