Our industry has undergone massive change in the last few years and it feels like only yesterday that T-Mobile USA, and the industry as a whole, was offering voice centric services and struggling to decide what to do about “data.” Once the smartphone revolution started and consumption of new services literally exploded, wireless operators had to quickly overcome many new challenges. This new era of growth in the wireless industry continues to create great opportunity coupled with many new challenges for the wireless operators.

In my role of Chief Technical Officer at T-Mobile USA, I have enjoyed leading our company through a profound technology transformation over a very short period of time. We have rapidly evolved our network from a focus on voice and text services, to providing support to a customer base with over 70% smartphones and a volume of carried data that is growing over 100% year on year. At the time of writing, we offer one of the best wireless data experiences in the USA which is one of the fastest growing wireless data markets in the world. We provide these services through a combination of both HSPA+, and more recently, LTE technologies.

Many wireless operators today have to quickly address how they evolve their network. And with consumer demand for data services skyrocketing, the decision and choice of technology path are critical. Some operators may be tempted to cease investments in their legacy HSPA networks and jump straight to LTE. In our case, we bet heavily on the HSPA+ technology first, and this has proved instrumental to our success and subsequent rollout of LTE. As you will discover throughout this book, there are many common elements and similarities between HSPA+ and LTE, and the investment of both time and money into HSPA will more than pay off when upgrading to LTE. It certainly did for us.

Furthermore, industry forecasts indicate that by the end of the decade HSPA+ will replace GSM as the main reference global wireless technology and HSPA+ will be used extensively to support global voice and data roaming. This broad-based growth of HSPA+ will see continued development of existing economies of scale for both infrastructure and devices.

This book provides a great combination of theoretical principles, device design, and practical aspects derived from field experience, which will help not only tune and grow your HSPA+ network, but also LTE when the time comes. The book has been written by 26 experts from multiple companies around the world, including network infrastructure and chip set vendors, mobile operators, and consultancy companies.

As worldwide renowned experts, Harri and Antti bring a wealth of knowledge to explain all the details of the technology. They have helped create and develop the UMTS and HSPA technologies through their work at NSN, and more recently pushed the boundaries of HSPA+ from Release 8 onward.

Pablo has been a key player to our HSPA+ success at T-Mobile, working at many levels to drive this technology forward: from business case analysis and standardization, to leading technology trials through design and optimization activities. His practical experience provides a compelling perspective on this technology and is a great complement to the theoretical aspects explored in this book.

I hope you will find this book as enjoyable as I have, and trust that it will help advance your understanding of the great potential of this key and developing technology.

Neville Ray
CTO
T-Mobile USA