High Speed Packet Access (
HSPA) is an amalgamation of two
mobile telephony protocols, High Speed Downlink Packet Access (
HSDPA) and High Speed Uplink Packet Access (
HSUPA), that extends and improves the performance of existing
3G mobile telecommunication networks utilizing the
WCDMA protocols. A further improved
3GPP standard,
Evolved HSPA (also known as HSPA+), was released late in 2008 with subsequent worldwide adoption beginning in 2010. The newer standard allows bit-rates to reach as high as 337 Mbit/s in the downlink and 34 Mbit/s in the uplink. However, these speeds are rarely achieved in practice.