Ericsson To Build Vodafone HSPA

Written by Adam Gosling

Friday, 07 March 2008

Vodafone has selected Ericsson as the primary vendor for its roll-out of a national High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) broadband network and has given it until the end of the year to complete the job. Ericsson is the primary equipment supplier to Telstra which also rolled out its NextG 3G network in record time. The company launched its first 3G services in Brisbane two years ago this month with network partner Optus. The two carriers have chosen to go their separate ways with the roll-out of 3.5G services with Optus announcing Chinese networking company Huawei and Nokia as partners in its 3.5G network build. As part of the upgrade the company will switch its 900MHz and 2100MHz base stations in lower density areas from 2G to 3.5G. Currently subscribers will drop back to the slower GSM network speeds once thy leave the footprint of the Optus/Vodafone network. In addition, "a significant proportion of high-demand sites in metropolitan areas covered by the Vodafone and Optus joint venture HSPA network sharing agreement will be upgraded to provide higher specification mobile data transmission" the company said in a statement. The roll-out plan will see engineering teams hit all states and territories at once, but the company gave no indication of where HSDPA services might become available first. The Ericsson hardware will allow a theoretical 14.4Mbps maximum downlink. But the company says the upgrade will also improve Vodafone's capacity to provide high-quality voice calls, SMS, video messaging and content services in more areas. The upgrade will expand Vodafone's mobile broadband coverage to reach 95 per cent of the areas where Australians live and work, compared to Teltra's similarly worded claims of reaching 98 per cent of the population. The deal, said to be worth A$500 million, should start in a matter of weeks, however, Vodafone said it will make further announcements throughout the year to give customers more detailed information on the schedule of work and mobile broadband launch dates for specific regions. Newer news items Polycom Phones Now Ignore Mobiles -01/04/2008 Motorola To Split -27/03/2008 Older news items Kyocera To Acquire Sanyo's Phone Business -22/01/2008 Yahoo! GungHo! On Mobility! -07/01/2008 45 nm Comes To Centrino -07/01/2008 Acer Elbows Into Third Place -27/08/2007 Lenovo Investigates Packard Bell Acquisition -07/08/2007 Tag This Now: