The 3G Partnership Project - a consortium of some 200 wireless vendors and operators - has begun a study to determine the feasibility of defining a standard that would support wireless downlink speeds as high as 100M bit/sec.

The group agreed at its December meeting in Athens to "undertake a study on the longer-term evolution of the (3G) radio interface," a 3GPP spokesman says. The study will be conducted by the 3GPP's Radio Access Network (RAN) working group, which expects to complete its investigation in June 2006.

Specifications for this "Super 3G standard" may be ready by June 2007, according to the 3GPP spokesman.

Though the proposal for the study was authored by 26 firms within the 3GPP - including NTT DoCoMo, Alcatel, Cingular Wireless, Ericsson, Lucent, Motorola, Nokia, Nortel, Qualcomm, Siemens, T-Mobile and Vodafone - the work will include all 200 members of the 3GPP, the spokesman says.

The project follows up a 3GPP RAN Longterm Evolution Workshop that took place in Toronto in early November. The work does not specify any particular technologies - such as High-speed Downlink Packet Access (HSPDA), EV-DO, Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) or Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) - but instead indicates a need for identifying methods for greater bandwidth that maximize the use of the radio spectrum and offer increased flexibility for the delivery of future services, the spokesman says.

It will be the task of the study to define the relevant technologies, spectrum requirements and other issues - and then to launch the standardization activity, he says.

Currently, 3G technologies such as EV-DO and UMTS offer speeds of up to 2.4M bit/sec and 384K bit/sec, respectively. Both are based on CDMA technology.

OFDM provides download speeds of between 1M bit/sec and 1.5M bit/sec and upload speeds of between 300K bit/sec and 500K bit/sec. HSPDA, which is being trialed by Cingular and other operators, offers data rates up to 14.4M bit/sec.