HSPA, or High-Speed Packet Access, is the next step in the evolution of WCDMA 3G technology, and greatly improves data speed and capacity for packet-data communication. It also allows WCDMA mobile operators to enhance their data offerings while freeing them up to introduce new services.

Greger Blennerud, Ericsson's project director for mobile broadband, says: "HSPA delivers the speed and capacity that users really want, and what they are used to from fixed broadband services. The convenience of speed and greater bandwidth together with mobility will result in more users and a lot more traffic."

Australia's Telstra understood this relationship when it launched its nationwide mobile broadband WCDMA/HSPA network in October. The operator built a 3.6Mbps network that reaches about 98 percent of Australia's population.

The move brought broadband service to many of Australia's remote communities for the first time, spreading coverage over 1.9 million square kilometers.

In the near future, even faster data speeds made possible with HSPA Evolution will further enhance the user experience by enabling advanced services such as mobile TV and even TV on a user's home screen.

The advantage was clear when Ericsson was recently selected by members of the Mobilkom Austria group to expand and upgrade their WCDMA radio networks with the latest high-capacity HSPA functionality - including the uplink - in Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia and Liechtenstein.

In Vienna, Austria, where the system was rolled out on February 22, Mobilkom consumers now have the fastest mobile broadband speeds available in Central and Eastern Europe.

WCDMA with HSPA has introduced users to a variety of applications with superior performance: three to four times higher system capacity, data speeds measured in megabits per second, and substantially shorter response times.

HSPA is a collection of mobile telephony protocols that extend and improve the performance of existing Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) protocols. UMTS is often spoken of as 3GSM, emphasizing the combination of the technology's 3G nature and the GSM standard it was designed to succeed.

Competition between HSPA and other non-3GPP technologies is set to increase over time, but Peter Jarich, a senior researcher with US-based Current Analysis, says that he expects "HSPA to be the technology of choice."

"HSPA has the tech support and the customer base, and the other, non-3GPP technologies do not. As a result I think that we will continue to see HSPA lead the pack," he says.