You actually have it backwards - this will be a software-only upgrade for the base stations and infrastructure, it will be a hardware upgrade to handsets. DLDC requires a second receive chain (like half-MIMO) to do this, and no current handsets in the market (or chipsets, for that matter) have this embedded. The EGPRS2 will also require hardware modifications to work. Latency reductions is definitely part of EDGE Evolution and can be done in SW only, so this is something that you might see rolled out into existing handsets.
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You actually have it backwards - this will be a software-only upgrade for the base stations and infrastructure, it will be a hardware upgrade to handsets. DLDC requires a second receive chain (like half-MIMO) to do this, and no current handsets in the market (or chipsets, for that matter) have this embedded. The EGPRS2 will also require hardware modifications to work. Latency reductions is definitely part of EDGE Evolution and can be done in SW only, so this is something that you might see rolled out into existing handsets.