October 9th, 2008Mobile Broadband’s Big Spend
Nowadays it seems you can’t buy a laptop without a built-in Wi-Fi adaptor, and it has happened really quickly, in the space of 2 or 3 years. If the GSM Association gets its way, in another couple of years, most new laptops will have a Mobile Broadband adaptor as well. It has already started to happen, though currently most Mobile Broadband adaptors are in the form of plug-in USB ‘dongles’. They’re basically compact 3G (or 2.5G) mobile phones that hook your laptop up to the mobile phone network and provide fast data transfer rates, as good as and in some cases better than wired broadband. The only trouble is coverage is still a bit patchy, and there are several different standards around the world, but they’re working on that and multi-mode adaptors are not a problem to build. The plan is to pull everything together under a single banner, or rather a little label that will be stuck on laptops with built-in adaptors. There’s a lot riding on it too; Mobile Broadband will be touted as an alternative to Wi-FI and WiMax and with around $1 billion to spend, and the backing of the likes of Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo, Toshiba, 3 Group, Asus, ECS, Ericsson, Gemalto, Orange, Qualcomm, Telefonica Europe, Telecom Italia, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, and Vodafone, its hard to see how they can fail…
Tags: Broadband, Gemalto, Laptop, Lenovo, Mobile, network, Orange, phone, T-Mobile, Telecom, Telefonica, toshiba, Vodafone
