Meet Tom, a true careerist, midlife and mid career, must keep on top of his professional and personal life every minute of the day. He is a persona that represents an important consumer segment that relies on the products of Ericsson and other vendors. Visitors at this year’s World Mobile Congress are now meeting him in the Ericsson stand.

Business users like Tom make up an important early segment for the mobile broadband access that is enabled by HSPA, according to Lena Beming, Strategic Marketing Director for broadband at Ericsson.

“Business users are typically people who want to use mobile broadband as an add-on to their fixed access,” she says. “Another group of users benefiting from mobile broadband are people living in remote areas, where the only access to internet is through mobile broadband.”

Over the last year, the popularity of USB modems has increased the traffic in HSPA networks significantly.

"USB modems have made things really easy for the end-user," Beming says. "You just plug in your modem with your SIM-card and after a couple of minutes; you are experiencing high-performance mobile broadband. The availability of HSPA-embedded notebooks will increase usage even more."

Neil Mawston who is Director of Global Wireless Practice at Strategy Analytics, agrees.

"USB modems and PC cards are really the killer application for HSPA, which are driving the beyond voice network traffic at the moment," he says.

"They are very appealing to a lucrative segment of high-ARPU users, such as business users who want to email, browse the web and access work documents from wherever they are."

Fredrik Thunberg, product marketing manager at Ericsson Enteprise says that PC cards and USB modems are also enablers of business applications such as multimedia collaboration, conferencing and virtual presence, which is expected to further drive the growth of beyond voice network traffic.

Mawston was one of participants in a meeting about HSPA on February 11 in Barcelona. In the meeting, analysts, along with representatives from Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Dell and Qualcomm, discussed the current status and future evolution of HSPA.

"Pretty much everyone in the infrastructure space is behind HSPA and there is a clear and familiar upgrade path from HSPA all the way to LTE in the future," Mawston says.  "While WiMAX is probably here to stay, I believe that it will be a niche technology, at least globally. HSPA on the other hand, already has a very good installed base, all over the world. HSPA coverage is pretty much ubiquitous in many parts of the world."

However, the important thing for users is not which technology is enabling their broadband access; rather, what counts is the user experience.

"End-users don't care about the access technology as long as it is fast, reliable and cheap," Mawston says.