First HSUPA Device Approved by FCC
It's not because "United States" begins with a later letter of the alphabet, that it lags behind most other countries on the list of those testing and approving global communications standards. By the end of this year, the UK will have two major carriers -- Vodafone Wireless and T-Mobile -- serving broadband customers with new HSUPA capacities, with at least two other carriers set to follow after the start of 2008, according to reports there.
That's not a typo: The "U" in HSUPA refers to uplink capacity. Germany may be leading the world in adoption of so-called "super-3G" technology, with theoretical data uplink rates of 5.76 Mbps, compared to EDGE's phone modem-like speed of 118.4 Kbps. Nokia tried early on to get HSUPA going in the US over two years ago, ironically by leveraging interest in the technology in South America to get a rollout started in North America.
Now at long last, a Belgian company called Option N.V. announced this morning it has received US Federal Communications Commission approval for an actual HSUPA device: a wireless broadband card for notebooks called the GlobeTrotter Express. Its premise: US travelers need access to high speed communications in those countries that offer it. In the meantime, it has to comply with US regulations, even if it's being used in an area where HSUPA isn't deployed yet.
But if more and more users happen to have invested in such a device for such a reason, it could be the catalyst that at last gets a North American rollout going.
Option N.V. isn't overstating its case. While its peak HSDPA download speed is stated to be 7.2 Mbps, it's conservatively estimating upload speeds at 2 Mbps, with fallback rates at 384 Kbps for downward compatibility. Still, that's miles ahead of current wireless capability and even most wired broadband capacity in this country.
It could be the first bright spot in several months for Qualcomm, which produces the Mobile Station Modem MSM7200 chipset used in the Option N.V. device. Qualcomm began sampling this chipset as far back as April of last year, billing it as being compatible with 1xEV-DO parts.
Not even the GlobeTrotter Express is an experimental technology any more: Vodafone actually started selling it to German customers last month. It's a safe bet that its US counterpart, Verizon Wireless, may be the first to offer it to its US customers, hopefully before the "5G" era begins overseas.