A six-month trial is underway in Spain that will investigate the potential for HSPA being a substitute for fixed line ADSL services. Vodafone Spain said that 100 households in the town of San Quirze del Valles, near Barcelona were involved.
The pilot scheme has seen each house being equipped with HSPA 3G modems and Wi-Fi base stations with a view to using these instead of traditional ADSL-based high speed internet services.
The company said that the objectives of the trial were to establish the level of customer satisfaction with mobile broadband compared to traditional fixed line services, as well as studying both downlink and uplink speeds and download volumes. This would also involve monitoring the level of service and capacity Vodafone's mobile network might need in order to offer such services in a medium-sized city.
The results from this trial will be interesting given the growing deployments of WiMAX in Spain and whether HSPA could compete with this technology in a market where mobile data volumes are increasing rapidly.
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