Evolved High Speed Packet Access

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Evolved High Speed Packet Access, better known as HSPA+, HSPA (Plus) or HSPAP, is a technical standard for wireless broadband telecommunication. It is an evolution of the earlier HSPA standard. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), a mobile telecommunications standards organization, specified HSPA+ in its Release 7 and later versions. HSPA+ provides higher data rates than the original HSPA, with theoretical speeds of up to 42.2 Mbit/s on the downlink.^[1]

HSPA+ is considered an evolution of 3G technology, sometimes denoted as 3.75G. It allows an upgrade to existing 3G networks to provide speeds closer to newer 4G networks without requiring a completely new radio interface. For this reason, HSPA+ should not be confused with Long Term Evolution (LTE), a true 4G technology which uses a different air interface based on OFDMA and follows a separate technological evolution path.^[2]

To achieve higher data rates, HSPA+ introduces advanced antenna technologies like beamforming and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). Beamforming is a signal processing technique that focuses the wireless signal from a base station towards a specific receiving device, rather than spreading it in all directions. This signal concentration results in better reception and improved data speeds. MIMO increases throughput by using multiple antennas on both the transmitting (base station) and receiving (user's device) ends to send and receive multiple data streams at once. Further releases of the standard introduced dual carrier operation, which allows a device to communicate over two separate 5 MHz frequency bands simultaneously, effectively doubling the bandwidth.

Advanced HSPA+ is a further evolution that provides theoretical peak download speeds up to 168 Mbit/s and upload speeds up to 22 Mbit/s. This performance is achieved through techniques like using a more complex modulation method (such as 64-QAM), which encodes more data into each transmission, or by combining multiple radio carriers with features like Dual-Cell HSDPA.