HSDPA Might Not Live Up To The Hype, Either

The mobile industry has an unhealthly habit of ridiculously overhyping new technologies or products, setting them up to fail when they inevitably don't meet people's expectations. We saw it with WAP, then with MMS, then with 3G, and now we're in the hype cycle for WiMAX. The latest victim, though, is HSDPA, the upgrade for UMTS networks that's supposed to deliver speeds comparable to or better than EV-DO. There were suspicions something was up earlier in the year when NTT DoCoMo said it was pushing back its HSDPA launch, and now Motorola's released the results of some tests that don't sound very promising. While Motorola says the problems can all be rectified with the proper setup by mobile operators, its these sort of teething issues that have helped new mobile technologies miss people's expectations in the past.

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