Johan Bergendahl, chief marketing officer for Ericsson, on Tuesday gave credit to AT&T for essentially kick-starting the mobile broadband business for UMTS, saying the former Cingular’s deployment of high-speed packet access—and the subsequent launch of laptop data card service—started a chain reaction around the world resulting in 117 operators rolling out the high-capacity upgrade.

Bergendahl said GSM operators in Europe were satisfied with the new data speeds and added voice capacity of UMTS, mainly because their business models were entirely handset focused. Having 100 kb/s per second to 200 kb/s was plenty to serve the vast majority of handset-based applications, he said. But when Cingular launched its first data card over the HSDPA network in reaction to the EV-DO broadband service of its CDMA competitors, Sprint and Verizon, Cingular’s European counterparts took notice, Bergendahl said. Presented with a new business model that would allow them to compete with DSL broadband providers as well as mobile counterparts, UMTS operators began upgrading to high-speed packet access (a term that covers both uplink and downlink) much sooner they originally planned, Bergendahl said.

“It’s a misconception about cellular networks that HSPA is required for handsets,” Bergendahl said. “It’s really only required for laptops.”

Bergendahl pointed to Sweden where Hutchison’s 3 was the first to launch an HSPA driven laptop card service last year. Now, Sweden’s three other nationwide providers have followed suit, all of them either live with HSPA or in the process of deploying it. Ericsson in particular has benefited from the interest in HSPA. Of the 117 upgrade contracts out there, Bergendahl said it has 50 of them.

HSPA may have been laptop driven, but handsets have certainly benefited from the increases in downlink and uplink capacity. More robust and capacity-hungry applications have hit phones in the last year, and the upgrades have caused a general improvement in the quality of UMTS handset services such as web surfing and multimedia streaming, as well as shortening download times significantly, Bergendahl said.

But HSPA is a constantly evolving technology, producing capacity boosts every six to nine months as vendors climb through the HSPA’s technical iterations. New chips are supporting download speeds of 7 Mb/s and soon they will climb to 14.4 Mb/s. In HSPA’s next stages, when smart antenna technologies are added and higher modulation rates are achieved, it will drive uplink speeds to 42 Mb/s and downlink speeds to 12 Mb/s. That type of broadband capacity is far beyond what is required for even the biggest handset applications and are clearly focused on the mobile broadband and mobile computing market.