Olive to launch India’s first HSPA+ phone!

Olive Telecom which is a pioneer in Indian handset market has sent out a press invite to launch Olive’s and India’s first, HSPA+ phone in India. The event which will take place on Feb 9, 2011 has Aircel and Qualcomm as partners. From that it’s handy guesswork that the phone will have a Qualcomm chip and it will be launched on Aircel’s 3G network.

High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) is a combination of two mobile phone telephony protocols High speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) and High speed uplink packet access (HSUPA), which extends the performance of existing protocols. HSPA+ is the evolving standard of HSPA which is also called as Evolved HSPA. HSPA+ provides a download speed of 84 Mbps and upload speed of 22 Mbps, in theory. Ericsson has achieved a top download speed of 164 Mbps. A realistic download speed of 3-6 Mbps is possible on a HSPA+ phone/network.

HSPA+ is not 4G

Based on the speed alone, HSPA+ is faster than 3G. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for 4G. The current 4G technologies – WiMax and LTE – simply put, use a bigger pipe to transmit the data and facilitate download speeds of 140Mbps to 300 Mbps, depending on the spectrum they use. Japan has done 600 Mbps on 4G network. HSPA+ still runs on 3G network and probably uses the far end of the spectrum to provide higher speeds.

What Olive launching is a HSPA+ phone, most probably which runs an Android phone and would probably compete with handsets launched elsewhere in the world. As blogged here earlier, Olive is poised to launch its Android phone which would give a distinct advantage. There are a whole bunch of Android phones in India and manufacturers are trying hard to compete by segmenting products and playing on price. Olive’s phone launch and the price would be intriguing to watch. Olive has many first’s to its credit. Could its HSPA+ phone be one more?