AT&T HSUPA Aircards Have the Edge Over EDGE

AT&T, like the other major wireless carriers, has been on a determined program to upgrade its cellular data capabilities. Broadband is the service in demand for everything from Web browsing to streaming mobile video. Wireless is the broadband service in demand. Everyone wants to be connected to the Internet 24/7 wherever they happen to be. AT&T is only too happy to scratch that itch.

If you've been dutifully plodding along with your wireline broadband connection at work and/or home and get by with a basic cell phone for staying in touch verbally, then you may have missed the latest initiatives in the mobile broadband revolution. Even if you venture out with your trusty laptop to enjoy a hot cup of joe and relax with your favorite websites at a nearby WiFi hotspot, you may not be getting all the mobility you could have.

WiFi hotspots have been the rage for years, with free WiFi now expected in restaurants and hotels. What's really helped establish this technology is standardized interfaces built into nearly every laptop, notebook and netbook computer. Many smartphones are also WiFi enabled. WiFi has given everyone the idea that the Internet needn't be a tether to your desk. But WiFi has some real limitations.

This is what the much heralded WiMAX is supposed to address. Think of WiMAX as a WiFi hotspot that covers a town. Sounds pretty good, right? But WiMAX has been in development for years and is only now starting its years and years of nation-wide buildout.

In the meantime, the established mobile communications providers - the cell phone carriers - have been thinking that they've already established their turf and have the transmitting towers in place to provide near-universal wireless coverage. The one thing they've been lacking is a really fast Internet service to go along with their mobile telephone service.

This is the system that AT&T has been building out. It's been done in stages with connectivity similar to a dial-up ISP being launched first. Next came true broadband with a service called EDGE or Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution. EDGE gives you bandwidth similar to entry level DSL services at around 384 Kbps. That's not bad for email or general Web surfing, but most users are now spoiled with higher speeds and bandwidth-intensive applications like streaming video.

To gain more bandwidth, AT&T has been upgrading to a faster technology called HSPA or High Speed Packet Access. HSPA comes in two flavors. HSDPA is High Speed Downlink Packet Access. It is focused on a large download bandwidth of of up to 3.6 Mbps with a relatively small upload bandwidth. HSUPA offers a true broadband upload channel with download speeds up to 2 Mbps. I say "up to" because the performance you experience will vary with signal strength and how many other users are trying to access the network at the same time you are connected.

How do you get connected to the AT&T 3G BroadbandConnect and Nationwide EDGE networks? You'll need a wireless modem, such as the Option Quicksilver USB Modem, that plugs into a USB connector on your mobile computer. This particular aircard, as wireless modems are called, works with both types of networks. The Nationwide EDGE network is available in 13,000 cities. The faster 3G BroadbandConnect network based on HSPA (including HSUPA and HSDPA technologies) is now available in 260 U.S. metro areas.

The Quicksilver modem works with both PCs and Macs and is available free with your Wireless Data Plan order. The plan runs $60 a month and includes 5 GB of data per month. That's way more than most people will use on a mobile computer.

Sierra Wireless also offers a USB modem called the Sierra Wireless Mercury USB Modem for AT&T. It is also available free of charge with a data plan service order. The Sierra Wireless modem includes a built-in GPS receiver that can be used with location based services and a microSD slot for expandable memory.

If you prefer an aircard that plugs into a PCMCIA slot on your laptop, there are several to choose from. A free one is the Option GT Ultra PCMCIA PC/Mac Card which has a retractable butterfly antenna. Others available for a small cost include the Sierra Wireless AC881 PC/Mac PCMCIA Card, and the Option GT Ultra ExpressCard PC/Mac Card that fits into the ExpressCard/34 (mm) slots on some computers. Pick the card and interface that works best with your computers.

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HSUPA Joins HSDPA for Cellular Broadband

AT&T is nearly finished building out its upgraded cellular broadband network called HSPA or High Speed Packet Access. Just in time, too. The new BlackBerry Bold and the rumored iPhone upgrade will make good use of the higher data bandwidths that are now online at the cell towers. While most of the attention has focused on the download link, AT&T has quietly been upgrading the upload link also. What does this tell us about the next generation of mobile applications?

HSPA is part of the alphabet soup that is mobile technology. It's a network upgrade to the first installation of high speed cellular data for GSM networks. EDGE or Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution was good for jump starting applications such as video and music downloads, email, and Web browsing. But with speeds at the low end of what is available from DSL, around 230 Kbps, EDGE starts to feel noticeably poky for general Web browsing and streaming video. The HS in HSPA implies something much faster.

There are actually two pieces to the HSPA puzzle. HSDPA is the first and most important for most users. HSDPA stands for High Speed Download Packet Access. The download link has a maximum capacity of 14.4 Mbps or somewhere between 1 and 7 Mbps in practice. It's a huge improvement from EDGE and similar to Cable broadband speeds. Like most data links designed around Internet access, the uplink speed is much less. For HSDPA, it's 384 kbps maximum. That's perfectly acceptable if most of what you do is request Web pages, corporate data packages, software upgrades, email, music and video. The uplink requests are relatively small and infrequent. The big data blast is on the download link.

AT&T has pretty much completed its upgrade to HSDPA and now in the process of adding the second piece of the HSPA service, HSUPA or High Speed Uplink Packet Access. What HSUPA does in increase the uplink capacity from 384 kbps to a range of 500 to 800 kbps out of a maximum theoretical value of 5.76 Mbps. That complements AT&T download speeds of 1.4 Mbps.

Why bother upgrading the uplink? You don't need it for casual Web browsing, but it does have value for uploading larger files or running real-time applications such as mobile video conferencing. It also speeds things like posting to blogs, updating Web sites, or sending photos with high resolutions or video clips. Our impression that the nature of mobile services is changing is confirmed by wireless network upgrades such as HSUPA.

HSPA gives AT&T a fully functional 3G network, just in time to start working on further upgrades to 4G. HSPA has an evolutionary path called HSPA+ that increases downlink speeds to 42 Mbps and uplink speeds to 22 Mbps. Whether that path will be fully exploited remains to be seen, as AT&T is also committed to another technology called LTE or Long Term Evolution that ramps up the data bandwidth to 300 Mbps on the downlink and 75 Mbps on the uplink. This technology won't be fully deployed for at least a few years, giving us time to come up with HD video and other applications that can make good use of these incredible 4G speeds.