.Dust

I had a quick chat with a friend who lives in the United States regard­ing the future of HSPA Data Cards. By chance I also lis­tened to a com­mer­cial this morn­ing while I was dri­ving to the office. The com­mer­cial was one from Fujit­suSiemens and they were talk­ing about a lap­top with an embed­ded HSPA card.

I think that from dif­fer­ent point of views the HSPA mar­ket is sim­i­lar to the the early days of WiFi data cards.

PCM­CIA came first, a few Express­Cards model a lit­tle bit later and then a huge num­ber of USB adapters.

The dynamic I see is quite sim­i­lar even if the evo­lu­tion is faster. It took three, four years to go from PCM­CIA form fac­tor to USB in WiFi data cards while it seems that the very same evo­lu­tion has taken less than 18 months.

Nowa­days embed­ded WiFi is almost a stan­dard in any PC and the mar­ket is start­ing to approach in the very same way the HSPA connectivity.

Prob­a­bly HSPA will become a com­mod­ity in the future just it hap­pened with WiFi.

Or not?

There are some dif­fer­ences that may leave space for exter­nal data cards for a long time.

The first thing is about stan­dards. WiFi has evolved over years form 802.11b (Direct Sequence or Fre­quency Hoop­ing), 802.11g, 802.11a, 802.11n. These stan­dards were adopted world­wide even if with some dif­fer­ences on fre­quen­cies uti­liza­tion and the tech­nol­ogy has become quite pervasive.

On the HSPA side there is much more frag­men­ta­tion than there is in the WiFi arena. UMTS net­works are not as wide avail­able as WiFi Access Points and also HSPA is mov­ing its first steps in these months.

United States are still a big mar­ket for com­puter man­u­fac­turer and i do not think they will add HSPA to cur­rent con­fig­u­ra­tions even if it may be offered as an option.

Any­way the trend seems to be already set and some big com­pa­nies are plan­ning these kind of device in their portfolio.

Even chipset man­u­fac­turer are going to add sup­port to per­sonal com­put­ers via ded­i­cated chipsets. As an exam­ple have a look at the Gobi announce­ment from Qualcomm.

Related posts:

1. Turn Your Mobile Phone In A Mobile WiFi Access Point.
2. The Cell Phone Is The New Computer
3. The Evo­lu­tions Of Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Devices
4. Cables in a wire­less world
5. No Con­nec­tiv­ity And Feel­ing Lost