HSPA mobile broadband connections to reach 500 million by end of June
June 16, 2011 at 1:34 pm
The huge growth of mobile broadband, and its increasing popularity, has been revealed through the results of a new study.
The industry group GSMA has recently reported that by the end of June 2011 there will be over 500 million customers using HSPA (high speed packet access), which is the primary 3G technology.
The incredible figure means that the rate of adoption of HSPA is a massive 10 times greater in the first six years of its existence than the adoption of 2G when it first came onto the scene.
The reason for the huge growth is mainly down to the explosion in the popularity of smartphones. 3G smartphones are becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous with every passing month, and this combined with dongles and the growth in the popularity of 3G tablet computers has led to the huge take up of the technology.
And it won’t stop there. By the end of 2012, the figure will pass one billion due to the fact that there are currently over 19 million new HSPA connections every month.
At the same time, ISPs are set to invest billions in the technology over the next few years, and this will lead to ever-faster connections. One of these is LTE (long-term evolution technology), which can provide speeds up to 100Mbps.
LTE already boasts an impressive one million users across the world, a year and a half after it launched. It is expected to grow rapidly so that by 2015 there will be an estimated 300 million connections.
