Mobile telcos accelerate to Super 3G speed

Vodafone and T-Mobile launch competiting high speed mobile access services

Competition in wireless broadband increased last week as Vodafone’s High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) or “Super 3G” service went live, and T-Mobile switched on its rival HSDPA network for testing.

Vodafone subscribers in the Glasgow, Greater London, Greater Manchester, Sheffield and Tyneside areas can now sign up to the HSDPA service. The firm said its entire 3G network will be upgraded by next summer.

According to Vodafone downlink speeds will be around 1.4Mbit/s and uplink rates will be about 384kbit/s.

Vodafone’s Data Unlimited option costs £45 + VAT per month, which limits users to 1GB of data each month. PC Cards are priced at £49 + VAT.

Rival T-Mobile’s Mobile Broadband service will launch on 1 August covering 65 percent of the UK population. Its service will be much cheaper at £17 + VAT per month for a Web ‘n’ Walk data card with a fair use limit of 2GB.

T-Mobile’s mobile broadband marketing manager, Rob Langton, said that the maximum theoretical downlink speed available with its HSDPA service will be 1.8Mbit/s.

Both T-Mobile and Vodafone demonstrated their systems in the IT Week Labs. Our initial tests recorded results of just over 1Mbit/s for each service.

A Vodafone spokesman said that one of the most important benefits for firms will be the service’s lower latency, so the network responds faster to web page requests, for example. “The latency drops from 300ms for a current 3G network down to around 120ms for the HSDPA 3G networks. This makes it feasible to run business applications, and not just email,” he added.

Analyst firm Informa predicts there will be 200 million Super 3G users worldwide by 2010, up from 2.5 million today. But Butler Group analyst Sarah Burnett said uptake will hinge on imaginative pricing: “Basic consumer services could be kept cheap, with extra revenue generated from exclusive entertainment packages. Similarly, there could be added-value corporate services such as mobile video conferencing.”

UK customers can buy laptops from Acer, Dell and Lenovo with Vodafone’s 3G broadband adaptors built-in, which could help firms to roll out this technology more quickly.