Mobile broadband 'to reach 42Mbps next year'

Mobile
broadband speeds may reach 42Mbps next year, the chief technology officer at Ericsson has claimed.

The technology is growing in popularity in Europe but is still slow compared with most fixed-line connections.

However, John Cunliffe told PC Pro that, despite the fastest UK speeds being around the 7.2Mbps mark currently, there are ways of increasing it.

First of all, improving the codes which use the modulation, he believes the top speed could be nearly doubled to reach 14Mbps.

Following this, he said there were two steps, firstly moving to 64 QAM modulation which could bring the speed to 21Mbps and then 'multiple in multiple out' (MIMO).

"With MIMO we can go from 14Mbps to 28Mbps," he said.

"They're two parallel paths, but we can then combine them to get 42Mbps. Essentially this is happening through 2009."

Mr Cunliffe admitted that the mobilebroadband dongles which would be available to the public would not move as fast, but concluded by saying that speeds of 80Mbps would eventually be possible, before moving to Long Term Evolution technology.