Wind Telecomunicazioni (Wind Italy), the third largest player by subscribers in the Italian mobile market, has confirmed that it has successfully tested HSPA+ in Milan, achieving download speeds of up to 42Mbps. The trial was staged in association with Finnish vendor Nokia Siemens Network (NSN). Ziad Shatara, CTO of Wind Italy, commented: ‘In order to improve the quality of services for our customers, and rapidly expand our mobile broadband business, we needed strategic partners to implement technology quickly and smoothly. With its ability to innovate, vast experience in network modernisation and focus on energy efficiency, we found an ideal partner in Nokia Siemens Networks’. The long-anticipated evolution to HSPA+ is expected to improve the reliability of mobile internet connections for subscribers using data-intensive services, whilst reducing network energy consumption for the operator. The technology will also be future-proofed for Wind’s transition to Long Term Evolution (LTE).
According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, Wind first signified its intention to embrace HSPA+ technology in June 2010 when it contracted Chinese vendor Huawei to supply it with a number of integrated multi-standard Single RAN base stations – which support HSPA+, LTE and IP-ready – across seven Italian regions; the agreement also called for the creation of a joint innovation laboratory in Rome.