Evolved High Speed Packet Access

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Evolved High Speed Packet Access, HSPA+, HSPA (Plus) or HSPAP, is a technical standard for wireless broadband telecommunication. It is the second phase of HSPA which has been introduced in 3GPP release 7 and being further improved in later 3GPP releases. HSPA+ can achieve data rates of up to 42.2 Mbit/s.^[1] It introduces antenna array technologies such as beamforming and multiple-input multiple-output communications (MIMO). Beamforming focuses the transmitted power of an antenna in a beam toward the user's direction. MIMO uses multiple antennas on the sending and receiving side. Further releases of the standard have introduced dual carrier operation, i.e. the simultaneous use of two 5 MHz carriers. HSPA+ is an evolution of HSPA that upgrades the existing 3G network and provides a method for telecom operators to migrate towards 4G speeds that are more comparable to the initially available speeds of newer LTE networks without deploying a new radio interface. HSPA+ should not be confused with LTE though, which uses an air interface based on orthogonal frequency-division modulation and multiple access.^[2]

Advanced HSPA+ is a further evolution of HSPA and provides data rates up to 84.4 and 168 megabits per second (Mbit/s) to the mobile device (downlink) and 22 Mbit/s from the mobile device (uplink) under ideal signal conditions. Technically these are achieved through the use of a multiple-antenna technique known as MIMO (for "multiple-input and multiple-output") and higher order modulation (64QAM) or combining multiple cells into one with a technique known as Dual-Cell HSDPA.