"Our greatest success as a company doesn't come from technology but from placing the user at the center of everything we do," AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said in a keynote speech at CTIA Wireless 2007. However, since most of the world's telecommunications networks are based on GSM, the evolution of these networks will continue to play a major role in meeting consumers' needs.

"Moving to GSM was without a doubt the biggest technology decision we as a company have ever made," Stephenson said. His company, AT&T (formerly Cingular), recently decided that High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) would be its technology of choice for providing mobile broadband.

The evolution to HSPA comes about through a software upgrade to WCDMA. This is important because operators can leverage their existing assets.

Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is the next step for delivering an even more powerful mobile experience. At CTIA, Ericsson showed its LTE solution which included the advanced MIMO radio technology, capable of achieving speeds of more than 140Mbps.

Robert Jansen, portfolio market manager at Ericsson, was demonstrating LTE at CTIA. He says operators' decisions to move towards HSPA and LTE are simplified by the favorable economies of scale.

By 2011, the overwhelming majority of mobile subscribers will be connected to GSM-based networks. This means that HSPA and LTE will be the most efficient means for delivering mobile broadband to a mass market.

As part of the LTE demonstration, visitors could see high-speed downloads of large, 70Mb files, streaming high-definition TV, and high-definition video-conferencing.

HSPA is being used today by operators such as AT&T and T-Mobile in the US while CDMA operators such as Vivo (Brazil), Pelephone (Israel) and Telstra (Australia) have also chosen to migrate to this technology because of the economies of scale. The next phase of development, known as HSPA+, will be available in the next couple of years followed soon after by LTE.

While HSPA and LTE each have a compelling technology proposition, the real value is the freedom they give to consumers to get the content they want, whenever and wherever they want it.