HSPA+ Multiflow Lets Your Phone Talk to Two Towers at Once

With Mobile World Congress just around the corner, we're expecting a deluge of smartphones and tablets to be unveiled in the next couple of weeks. However, MWC isn't just about phones, it's about all things mobile. As such, Nokia Siemens has plans to show off something else entirely at at the conferences.

The company yesterday unveiled HSPA+ Multiflow, a technology that allows your phone to talk to two cell phone towers at once. HSPA+ Multiflow means that when located close to the edge of a mobile base station's cell, your phone can connect to a second base station serving a neighboring cell enabling a second path for data to reach the device. The feature promises to make more efficient use of networks' resources while delivering up to double the data speed and 50 percent faster responses when compared to existing HSPA+ networks.

"With 100 million smart devices being added every month, we see a consequent increase in 'smart' applications that make use of their advanced capabilities. Not only is network traffic rising dramatically, much of it is also unpredictable in nature, and this can impact user experience," said Keith Sutton, head of the WCDMA business line for Nokia Siemens Networks. "This is where HSPA+ Multiflow helps operators – it reduces imbalances that typically occur in network resource usage, and increases HSPA+ speed and capacity."

Nokia Siemens is planning a live demonstration for MWC attendees. This will be based on Nokia Siemens Networks' commercial Single RAN offering and Qualcomm's prototype USB dongles. Nokia Siemens said in a release today that it expects HSPA+ Multiflow to be 3GPP standardized by mid 2012 and available commercially from Nokia Siemens Networks by second half of 2013.

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