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GSMA Announces Mobile Broadband Service Mark Initiative Backed by Global Media Spend of $1 Billion

Journalists and other representatives of the media are invited to contact ABI Research to learn more about this significant development and to discuss its implications with our industry analysts.

Today, the GSMA announced an initiative backed by operators, device suppliers, software firms and chipset vendors to drive awareness of mobile broadband connectivity embedded within computing devices such as notebooks. The initiative's primary focus is a graphic service mark bearing the words "Mobile Broadband" to be attached to notebooks and designed to help customers know which laptops are mobile-broadband enabled. The GSMA expects a global media spend of $1 billion around this service mark within the next year to create awareness of mobile broadband access.

ABI Research principal analyst Dan Shey comments, "HSPA broadband networks are firmly anchored in major metropolitan areas of Europe, North America and other parts of the developing world and are the foundation for pushing sales of devices with embedded cellular modems. But awareness of embedded mobile broadband has not been high, as operators are the main proponents of mobile broadband, primarily through sales of PC Cards and USB modems.

This initiative is designed to raise awareness of devices with embedded cellular connectivity such as laptops, UMPCs, MIDs and eventually consumer electronics."But is this initiative good for everyone? Says Shey, "This initiative poses the greatest challenges for operators. On one hand, more devices that are cellular enabled will create more opportunity to sell mobile broadband services.

However, except for standard practices of bundling, offer design, and subsidization, it is unclear how operators will differentiate their mobile broadband services as more devices have embedded cellular connectivity. Subsidization is already one area operators would like to avoid but they also want to avoid competing based on price.

Operators will need to think carefully about how mobile broadband will affect their businesses as mobile broadband devices become more widely available and achieve higher levels of consumer awareness." [ABI Research]

T-Mobile Will Have 3G in 27 Markets by Year's End

  • Posted: Thursday, September 25, 2008
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  • Author: pradhana
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  • Filed under: 3G dan 4G, HSDPA, HTC

By Peggy Albright

T-Mobile USA, expanding its 3G network to reach more of its customer base, said it will effectively double the number of markets covered with UMTS/HSDPA by the end of the year. The company currently has UMTS/HSDPA commercially available in 13 major metropolitan markets. It will have another eight up and running by mid-October and and additional six markets online by year's end.

The announced deployments will bring the number of T-Mobile markets served by 3G to 27. With the expansion, more than two-thirds of the company's current data subscribers will have access to the new networks. The company plans to continue expansion to more customers and markets through 2009.

T-Mobile launched its much-delayed 3G network in May of this year, and as it works urgently to bring these new markets online, it intends to use what it calls "new and compelling" data-centric, all-in-one devices to attract new customers to its HSDPA network. Currently, T-Mobile's 3G customers have access to a number of UMTS handsets as well as the HSDPA-enabled Sony Ericsson TM506.

One of the new devices to watch for, which T-Mobile is expected to announce on Tuesday this week, is the HTC Dream, the first commercial device based on the Google Android operating system. Clearly, T-Mobile hopes to create some buzz with this device. It has said that the Android device will hit the market in mid-October, which not-so-coincidentally is when the next round of cities will have its 3G services.

Separately, T-Mobile's parent company in Germany announced that it had conducted successful tests of the "4G" technology called LTE in partnership with Nortel Networks. The partners claim to have maintained a LTE mobile connection and data rates of up to 170 Mbps on the download, and up to 50 Mbps for uploads, while driving in a car at highway speeds and transferring connections between different cell sites. [FierceBroadbandWireless]

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