The GSM Association (GSMA), an industry group comprised of mobile operators, wants to see 3G (third-generation) cellular technologies used for wireless broadband in notebook PCs, but operators will have to change their way of doing business to make that happen.
3G technologies like WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access) provide data at downlink speeds up to 384K bps (bits per second), but advances in 3G technology, like HSDPA (high-speed data packet access), offer speeds of 3.6M bps or more.
Cellular operators have pinned their hopes on these new high-speed technologies to boost their mobile data business. “We’re not simply providing voice, we’re all going after the data market in a very significant way,” said Craig Ehrlich, chairman of the GSMA’s board of directors and a director at Hutchison Mobile Communications Ltd., speaking at the 3GSM World Congress Asia conference in Singapore last week.
As part of these efforts, GSMA is working with Intel Corp. to make HSDPA support a standard component of notebook computers, alongside existing Wi-Fi access and planned support for WiMax. “Mobile broadband — HSDPA — is becoming and will become a standard feature of notebook PCs,” said Rob Conway, the GSMA’s chief executive officer.
Others are not so sure HSDPA will be widely used for mobile access.
“Irrespective of what people say, 3G is about voice. There’s no question about that,” said Ray Owen, the Asia-Pacific director of wireless broadband at Motorola Inc., noting that WiMax and Wi-Fi have important roles to play. “It’s not necessarily that cellular technologies will do everything,” he said.
The principal problem with 3G and HSDPA is cost. Rates for 3G data services are high in most countries, making the technology ill-suited for heavy data access, with the exception of wealthy customers and some business users.
In Japan, which was the first country to get commercial 3G services, users pay a flat rate for sending e-mails or surfing the Web from their handsets. However, PC users who access the Web over 3G networks pay much more. Computer data access costs roughly
