Next generation mobile broadband migration inevitable

  • November 10, 2009

Global mobile broadband adoption continues to witness meteoric rise, the latest study from Wireless Intelligence appears to suggest.

Mobile broadband uptake over HSPA is now estimated to be 9 million per month, comparing to 5.5 million per month a year ago.

The research shows that mobile broadband usage has been driven by the higher data speeds and improved service experience by the providers who use various mobile data technologies like HSPA, HSPA+, Wimax and LTE. However, HSPA still remains the dominant mobile technology. GSM predicts that HSPA based mobile broadband will add 27 million new connections by this year end.

Dan Warren, director of Technology at the GSMA says:

“HSPA technology continues its phenomenal growth as thousands of operators, vendors, application and service providers back the technology, ensuring the presence of a vibrant and competitive ecosystem,”

There are estimated be over 285 active HSPA networks across 120 countries worldwide that support more than 167.5 million connections. Regions like Africa, Eastern Europe and the Americas would see more customers taking HSPA connections in the coming years.

Increased mobile broadband adoption has also led to heavy mobile data traffic across the mobile networks. Especially, the increased use of mobile broadband dongles, smartphones and 3G enabled devices like laptops and consoles contribute to the larger part of data traffic on the networks.

This makes many operators turn to next generation mobile broadband technologies like HSPA+ and LTE to meet the increasing mobile data traffic. There are now over 56 HSPA+ networks on the globe while only half of them provide service to the users.

LTE or Long Term Evolution network deployment is currently underway in many places and the first LTE based mobile broadband is expected to be available by next year.

Warren says that next generation technologies HSPA+ and LTE would see nearly all operators globally switching to them to meet the future needs, however, some operators may choose to deploy HSPA+ first or move straight to LTE mobile technology.