The success of HSPA systems continues and there is growing momentum towards the evolved version of the technology - HSPA+, which was largely specified in 3GPP Release 7.

A recent report from the GSA highlights the contribution of dual carrier or dual cell technology (DC-HSPA+) towards delivering 42 Mbps, using 64QAM modulation and using dual adjacent carriers.

GSA have reported that there are now 245 HSPA+ devices available, compared to 92 just a year ago.

As operators face the challenge of more demand for mobile services and the limited available capacity to deliver them, a call has been made for additional spectrum to be found.

In their new White Paper the UMTS Forum urges the ITU to examine spectrum requirements for 3GPP systems as well as broader IMT systems, to identify the potential for harmonized spectrum at its future conferences.

The Forum urges that additional spectrum should be allocated.

The latest 4G Americas data puts the total number of 3GPP mobile subscriptions at 5.2 Billion, accounting for 90% of all mobile phone users.

LTE represents only 3.8 million of those subscriptions, or less than 1%, but these are still early days for the technology and great things are expected - as highlighted in the“Evolution to LTE” report from the Global mobile Suppliers Association, where LTE is described as “the fastest developing mobile system technology ever”, based on solid statistics on product announcements and on 248 operator commitments.

The Global Certification Forum is now able to provide assurance that dual-mode LTE / UMTS devices can hand-off sessions between the two radio-access technology families.

A recent GCF press release gave details of the first dual-mode device to achieve certification, supporting 2100 MHz LTE and other 3G radio - HSPA and WCDMA - in the 800 & 2100 MHz bands.

The Forum now expect a growing number of devices for further band combinations, adding to a heavy work load that has seen the approval of more than 470 different 3GPP mobile phones, wireless modems and connected devices in the past 12 months.

The MultiService Forum, working closely with the GSMA has demonstrated successful VoLTE calls and MMTel services across different networks, using equipment from 19 participating equipment manufacturers.

To promote the success of the event, they have also published a white paper - “MSF VoLTE Interoperability” - which concludes that “…VoLTE is a viable solution for providing voice services over LTE access technology, and can be deployed with roaming and interconnect functionality to provide equivalent service as CS-based voice services today.”

The 3GPP interfaces (Technical Specifications) used during testing were fully listed in Section 3 of the MSF Testing Scenarios created for the event.