Press Releases

Lisbon, 11 October 2010 – From today, Vodafone Portugal is offering its customers a Mobile Broadband service over Dual Carrier HSPA technology at speeds up to 43.2 Mbps.

After having been the first Portuguese operator to test this wireless data transmission technology in January this year, Vodafone is now rolling it out commercially to its customers, giving them the opportunity of download speeds up to 43.2 Mbps.

For this launch, from today Vodafone is offering the first device in Portugal capable of supporting Dual Carrier HSPA technology – the Vodafone Connect Pen K4605, which supports download speeds up to 43.2 Mbps and upload speeds up to 11.4 Mbps, and costs €119.90.

With the introduction of this new technology a new price plan has been created for the Mobile Broadband service with a monthly charge of €49.99 which allows download speeds up to 43.2 Mbps and unlimited bandwidth. With this new price plan, Vodafone customers will be able to download an mp3 file (5 MB) in less than one second, a video clip (35 MB) in less than 6 seconds or download a movie (800 MB) in less than 2 minutes.

Dual Carrier HSPA is a development of 3G/HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) technology that uses the aggregation of two adjacent radio channels to significantly increase connection speeds. The new Dual Carrier HSPA technology will make it possible to increase current download speeds, significantly improving customers’ experience of Mobile Internet.

Dual Carrier HSPA technology is currently available in the city of Lisbon and is expected to be extended by the end of the year to other areas of Greater Lisbon, Porto and other district capitals.

Vodafone has led the introduction of new technologies and mobile data transmission speeds in Portugal and was the first Portuguese operator to test the Dual Carrier HSPA 43.2 Mbps and HSPA 21.6 Mbps with 64 QAM technologies and one of the first in the world to roll out this speed on a mobile network. It was also the first operator to test HSPA MIMO 28.8 Mbps technology.