AT&T's short-term answer to WiMAX: HSPA Rel. 7

During a presentation yesterday at Morgan Stanley's 13th Annual Communications Conference in Washington, D.C, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said he believes AT&T has a time-to-market advantage over WiMAX with its HSPA technology. De la Vega said that HSPA Release 7 will give the company 7 Mbps to 20 Mbps data speeds within the next two years and the company will only have to deploy a software upgrade.

"When people talk about future technologies like WiMAX, they don't realize it doesn't do any good to just have it in the network. They have to have devices, coverage and the entire ecosystem," he said. "We have the best broadband network with the best throughput today. And it will get better in the short term." Of course, the company does plan to migrate to LTE technology in 2010, bringing data speeds of up to 100 Mbps.

Meanwhile, Dell made an agreement with Ericsson that will see the laptop maker incorporate Ericsson's HSPA modules in its laptop portfolio beginning in the second quarter.

For more:
- see the replay of de la Vega's presentation here [1]
- check out this telecoms.com article [2]

Related articles:
AT&T extends 3G deployments, backs LTE for 4G. See this AT&T LTE story [3]
Ericsson develops HSPA module for laptops Check out this Ericsson HSPA article [4]
The HSPA PR machine heats up as WiMAX heats up [5]