Israeli mobile operator mulls 3.5G upgrade

"We're still studying a network upgrade. If we decide to go ahead, we'll be able to offer our customers high-quality and uniform video calls, and improved radio and television broadcasts over cellular, at double the speed of home ADSL networks," Pelephone Communications Chief Executive Officer Gil Sharon said via a report in the Israeli business newspaper Globes.

"If we decide to upgrade to 3.5G, we'll carry out a test during the fourth quarter of 2006," Sharon continued.

Pelephone, Israel's oldest cellular provider, met with the other company executives at the CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment conference last week in Las Vegas, according the report.

The move to 3.5G would be accomplished via Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) Evolution Data Optimized (EVDO) technology, according to the report. At the conference, Pelephone representatives looked into Revision A (REV-A) technology, which is the next iteration of CDMA, the report said.

REV-A is expected to increase cell phones' downloading speed to 3.1 megabits per second, a substantial increase from the current theoretical maximum of 2.4 megabits per second, according to the newspaper. At the same time, upload speed would jump from the current 144 kilobits per second to 1.8 megabits per second, the newspaper said.

Because much of the infrastructure to support 3.5G is already in place, the company told the newspaper it doesn't expect the upgrade to be expensive.

Copyright 2006 by United Press International