Although HSDPA has caught fire in places like Europe and Japan, why can’t it win out in the US? After all, it is the faster standard. It reminds me of the VHS vs. Beta battle in the 80s. The standard you’d expect to win, the one with higher quality and smaller space consumption, ended up losing. When will Goliath ever catch his break and win?
If you compare stats, HSDPA is definitely the Goliath. It maxes out at 14.4 Mbit/second, which is nearly 7 times the speed of EVDO. The system is faster because of the “fast packet scheduling” protocol that is used. Essentially, the personal communication devices, such as smart phones, will schedule data sending/receiving incidents by periodically transmitting an indication of the downlink signal quality. By periodically, I’m talking up to 500 times a second. In other words, it micro-manages and optimizes data transmission on the fly many times per second. More data from the cell towers is then sent to the users whose devices say that they have better signal quality.
Not only that, but HSDPA also decreases latency from towers to devices. This is actually a two-fold improvement because data transmission and reception is a round-trip procedure.
With these advances and many others that become a little too technical to get in to, HSDPA has EVDO sacked. But if you look at a map of the US and compare areas where EVDO is available and where HSDPA is available, you will notice that EVDO virtually covers every single nook and cranny where people live, and HSDPA only exists in a few metropolitan areas. We are far behind our 1st world friends overseas.
Another indication that US is more willing to adopt EVDO is the choice Kyocera made to only use EVDO with their routers. They save money by only accepting certain air cards that use EVDO and have thus become one of the more recognized brands for mobile routers.
I guess my only theory of why EVDO is so popular, is the US phone companies’ willingness to adopt 3G technologies before other countries, making EVDO the standard in the early half of this decade. Now that HSDPA is out for mass use, it will probably be very costly to upgrade. Countries like England, Germany, and Japan got into 3G technology as HSDPA was released, allowing that adoption much easier for them to finance.
Cameron Postelwait manages content for SewellDirect.com, proud retailers of mobile routers like the Kyocera KR2.
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