Access to the internet at anytime with a mobile broadband subscription opens the door to e-mail, phone catalogs, public transport time schedules, online music stores, video sites, doctors, banks and government services. Users get quick and easy access to whatever they want to do from wherever they are.
Lena Beming, strategic marketing director for broadband within Ericsson, says: "Mobile broadband is popular, there are already 140 HSPA networks operating in more than 80 countries around the world. When people can access the internet all the time and everywhere, society as a whole benefits."
"It is a high-volume technology and helps enable broadband for all," Beming says. "In many places, just having a mobile connection means you can do business. The better the communication, the better the business, and adding mobile broadband into laptops and other devices means you can do even more business."
Ericsson believes the radio-based technology HSPA is an excellent way to provide services to everyone, everywhere, cost-effectively, efficiently and with full mobility. One company that understands the power of this technology is Telstra in Australia, which has an HSPA-enabled network that covers 98 percent of the population.
"Australia is a huge country, and compared with alternative technologies, the operator needs fewer sites to attain good coverage in remote places when using HSPA," Beming says.
Because it is a part of the GSM/WCDMA/LTE family, HSPA has large economies-of-scale advantages.
"Operators add HSPA to their existing GSM/WCDMA networks with a very small extra step," says Jeanette Fridberg, director of product marketing at Ericsson. "This is ideal in low average-revenue-per-user markets, where HSPA technology is useful to operators and users who want internet with mobile broadband on any device."
With HSPA, mobile broadband reaches the same performance as traditional fixed-line broadband, with user speeds of up to 7Mbps. HSPA is also the best available technology when considering high download and upload speeds. The uplink is becoming increasingly important, with many people interested in uploading their clips onto YouTube and similar video-sharing sites.
"In Tokyo, where mobile phone culture is very strong, young people want to listen to music and share data files when traveling on the subway," Fridberg says. "There is no coverage between stations, so they have to download and upload everything with their 3G phones in 30 seconds while the train is at a station, making high speeds a vital factor.
"The main advantages of HSPA are high data rates, low latency between the handset and the server, and wide-area coverage with full mobility. It's cost-effective, which means the operator's costs are brought to a minimal level," Fridberg says.
