Nortel, O2 test next generation wireless broadband

Nortel and O2’s parent company mmO2 has successfully completed a series of live wireless calls using a newly emerging broadband technology that can deliver dramatically faster and more sophisticated wireless services.

The new technology is known as High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA). O2 says it plans to deploy Nortel’s solution across portions of its pan-European wireless network.

Last October, O2 announced an expansion of Nortel’s role as an infrastructure supplier of third generation (3G) Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) wireless infrastructure for O2’s networks across the UK, Germany and Ireland.

The new HSDPA technology trials involve a future advancement of this service capability to the 3.75G level (i.e. beyond third generation). In the HSDPA test calls, a five-megabyte music file was downloaded in less than 15 seconds, compared to two minutes over a traditional dial-up connection.

A 45-megabyte MPEG video file was downloaded in about three minutes, compared to 15 minutes over dial up. An e-mail with a five-megabyte attachment was downloaded in 20 seconds.

Commercial field trials of the Nortel HSDPA solution will begin in the second quarter of 2005 and are expected to include an integrated, commercial data card product.