Mobile Phones Blog

GSMA to push “Broadband Inside” label into laptops

October 2nd, 2008 by Peter

The GSM Association which represents the interests of hundreds of cellular operators around the world, has cleverly positioned mobile broadband initiatives as a replacement for Wi-Fi and convinced all the leading laptop suppliers to move one step beyond broadband dongles in one concerted leap, to putting a chip on the PC motherboard for devices delivered across 91 countries. They will also the devices have broadband capability with a “Mobile Broadband” badge. The move has echoes of the “Intel Inside” and the “Centrino” campaign which triggered mass take up of Wi-Fi.

PC makers, operators and chip providers all lined up to back the move, this week including 3 Group, Asus, Dell, ECS, Ericsson, Gemalto, Lenovo, Microsoft, Orange, Qualcomm, Telefonica Europe, Telecom Italia, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, Toshiba and Vodafone - which includes operators serving 760 million customers, around a quarter of the global cellular market.

“Mobile Broadband is like a home or office broadband connection with one crucial difference: freedom. Freedom from hot spots, freedom from complexity and freedom from security concerns,” said Michael O’Hara, CMO of the GSMA. “Today, 16 of the world’s largest technology companies have committed to change the way people get online forever. This commitment is manifested in a service mark that we expect to see on several hundred thousand notebooks in the shops by the holiday season. The Mobile Broadband badge will assure consumers that the devices they buy will always connect - wherever Mobile Broadband is available - and that they can expect a high standard of simplicity and mobility.”

Members of the initiative have committed a media spend of over $1 billion during the next year between them to push the idea in the hope of creating a $50 billion service revenue market.

Given the involvement of Dell, Lenovo and Toshiba it is likely that the other major PC makers, notably HP, will be forced to play ball at some point, which could make this a slam dunk despite Intel’s long term desire to be the main provider of chips which talk to Wi-Fi, WiMAX and cellular all through a single software defined radio. Intel has been saying for three years that this was the right solution, but has been unable to deliver that vision fast enough, but now the cellular community wants to take the decision out of Intel’s hands. Qualcomm in particular has a chip that will speak to either UMTS or CDMA 2000 networks in all of their data flavors and is certainly one of the movers behind this play.

The GSMA is also aiming this fairly and squarely not just at laptops, but also at machine to machine applications, and once again, it was a Qualcomm chip that facilitated the creation of the Amazon Kindle book reader in the US, which downloads ebooks during inactive periods over the Sprint EV-DO network. Similar services are now being designed for Europe and the UK.

The GSMA statement suggested that previously unconnected devices - from cameras and MP3 players to refrigerators, cars and set-top boxes would be the next step after this campaign.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm and is filed under General, Mobile Broadband, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.