AT&T throttling the Inspire 4G?

By George Wong on 02/21/2011, filed in Home > CellPhones

AT&T throttling the Inspire 4G? In today’s uninspiring news, it has been recently discovered that AT&T have been disabling 4G upload speeds on their latest Android phone, the HTC Inspire 4G. Whether this was done intentionally or not it’s yet to be known. Apparently HSUPA, a feature of the Qualcomm chip that powers the phone has been disabled on the phone itself, thus negating users’ ability to upload at 4G speeds. However, all hope is not lost – the unlocking of HSUPA can be done with a firmware update so a fix for this should be coming soon either from AT&T/HTC themselves for shipping a phone with such a problem, or from the folks from the community. It’s bad enough that they don’t offer “true 4G” with HSPA+ (3.5G) on their network, and next they choose to cap the upload speeds of their “4G” phone to have only 3G upload speeds? I’m pretty sure Inspire 4G customers aren’t going to take this one lightly.

Follow:CellPhones 4g Android at&t HSPA+HTC inspire inspire 4g speeds throttle

Android: Android is the mobile operating system from Google. The software was originally built by a company called Android Inc, that was purchased by Google in 2005. From its modest debuts, Android has become a powerhouse that powers not only smartphones and tablet, but a host of other less high-profile devices and gadgets. Although Android is not a community-driven project, Google does release the source code as open-source under the Apache license. You can follow Ubergizmo on Android with Google Currents.

HSPA+: is also known as Evolved High-Speed Packet Access. It is a mobile broadband protocol that was defined by the 3GPP standard, release 7. In Theory, the HSPA+ data rate can go up to 84 Mbps (Megabits per second) downstream (to the mobile), and 22Mbps upstream (back to the tower). These numbers are achieved by using multiple streams, so they should be considered theoretical and peak performance numbers. The HSPA+ specifications support up to 168Mbps of theoretical peak rate. Although many HSPA+ carriers call it 4G, it is very different from 4G LTE.

HTC: High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC) is a Taiwanese manufacturer of smartphones and tablets. The company started as an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) that was building devices for others, but went on making HTC-branded smartphones based mostly on Microsoft's Windows operating system (OS) for mobile. In 2009, it began to shift its core focus away from Windows mobile devices to Android-based ones. In 2010 the company went back to the Windows Phone eco-system.

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