HSPA is a combination of 2 mobile telephony protocols – High Speed Downlink Packet Access and High Speed Uplink Packet Access

HSPA improves the performance of existing WCDMA protocols.

HSPA provide increased performance by utilizing schemes of modulation and refining the protocols, through which the base stations and handsets communicate

HSPA is used for better usage of the available bandwidth provided by WCDMA

HSPA supports data rates of up to 14 MBit / s in the downlink

HSPA supports data rates of up to 5.8 MBit / s in the uplink

HSPA reduces the latency and increases up to 5 times more system capacity during downlink and twice more system capacity during uplink

HSPA uses 16QAM for yielding higher bit rates

HSPA rollouts are achieved by implementing software upgrades to existing 3G networks. This gives HSPA a head start over WiMax.