Vodafone has announced it will launch its HSDPA service in the UK, Austria, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain and Hong Kong on Thursday. “Vodafone claimed that HSDPA will provide download speeds of up to 1.4Mbps, and upload speeds of 384Kbps. In testing, download speeds of 3.6Mbps have been achieved, and Nortel has estimated that 7.2Mbps will eventually be feasible.”
This is obviously good news for the mobile content industry, since faster downloads mean more opportunities for mobile content. Increasing bandwidth (and download limits) could also reduce or eliminate the bandwidth shock that can be a problem for mobile content — which occurs when someone buys a $3 piece of content and finds out they’ve paid $7 in data fees.
The announcement has drawn a response from T-Mobile UK, which said that its “super 3G” service will go live on August 1, with “download speeds of up to 1.8Mbps, though T-Mobile admitted real-world performance is more likely to be around 1Mbps – still rather faster than regular 3G download speeds. The theoretical maximum will rise to 3.6Mbps in 2007, the carrier said, then to 7.2Mbps and 10Mbps in 2008/2009.”
The carrier is ultimately promising download rates of 20Mbps by 2011…
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