Industry giants unite to push mobile broadband in laptops

Mobile phone companies, chip makers and laptop manufacturers are joining forces to push built-in support for mobile broadband technology on laptop computers.

The alliance will build wireless chips into the computers which will accelerate current 3G speeds and work with future 4G networks. A service mark will identify laptops with the integrated mobile technology. The branded laptops are expected to be on shop shelves in 91 countries by Christmas.

At their fastest, current mobile internet technologies, which include High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and Long Term Evolution, support web browsing speeds of up to 7 megabits per second. However, such high speeds are currently available only at airports and in parts of central London.

“It’s comparable to fixed broadband services and close to what you get in a Wi-Fi hot spot,” said Mike O’Hara, a spokesman for the GSM Alliance, which brokered the deal to produce the modules and build them into laptops. The GSM Alliance is a trade body that represents 80% of the world’s mobile phone companies.

“You can go to an operator’s store, buy a laptop and it will be already fitted so you can go online instantly,” O’Hara added. “That’s a powerful proposition. There’s a natural evolution such as we saw with Wi-Fi which at first used to need an external card and became embedded.”

Hugh Padfield, principal manager for PC connectivity at Vodafone, said that the logo and branding scheme would help to further drive sales in mobile broadband across the network: “It will help to create even more momentum than what we have already seen with mobile broadband. It’s reached something of a tipping point even before it’s been built in.”

Altogether 16 firms have signed up to the deal, including laptop manufacturers Dell, Toshiba and Lenovo as well as 3, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Ericsson, Orange, Qualcomm and Vodafone. The alliance has pledged to spend about £554m ($1bn) to promote the logo and inform customers about laptops fitted with the technology.

The GSM Association says that mobile broadband technology will soon crop up in other devices such as digital cameras, music players, cars and phones.

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