Lenovo Laptops to ship with embedded Ericsson HSPA

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 05 February 2008 10:27

Business IT - Technology

Lenovo has become the first announced customer for Ericsson's HSPA module, which includes a GPS receiver, and will start offering laptops with this embedded later this year. The Ericsson module, in PCI Express format supports HSPA, EDGE, GPRS and GSM. For HSPA it will initially offer peak rates of 7.2Mbps in the downlink and 2Mbps in the uplink. The initial product, the F3507G, will support HSPA at the 850MHz frequency of Telstra's Next G network in addition to the more globally popular frequencies of 1900<MHz and 2100<MHz.

Ericsson also has another PC manufacturing customer for the product, as yet unannounced. Speaking after the company debuted its HSPA module at the CES show in Las Vegas in January, Kursten Leins, strategic marketing manager - multimedia, Ericsson Australia, said: "We now have two of the seven largest PC brands among our customers. This is an extremely dynamic market segment and there was a huge amount of interest at CES."

He predicted a healthy market in Australia for HSPA enabled laptops in the wake of recent declines in mobile broadband prices. "Towards the end of 2007 we witnessed a rapid decline in the cost of HSPA mobile broadband plans from all Australian operators, to a level that is on-par with some fixed broadband service offerings. We see 2008 as a pivotal year for consumer devices with HSPA-embedded modules and this will help make mobile broadband a mass market offering.

"HSPA is being embedded in laptops now and will soon be included in a wide range of other consumer electronics devices, such as gaming systems, digital cameras, GPS navigators, and car maintenance systems."

Australia already has one HSPA laptop on the market, From Fujitsu, the ultraportable Q2010 and using a Sierra Wireless HSPA module, the MC8755 offering 3.6Mbps and voice communications, but it does not operate at the 850MHz frequency. That should soon change.

Sierra Wireless (which supplies the current ExpressCard and USB modems offered by Telstra on Next G), has just announced a new embedded HSPA module, the MC8785V which does operate at 850MHz. It is claimed to be "the only voice-enabled module for global HSPA networks available on the market today," so enables a laptop to be used to make and receive voice calls over a cellular network.

Like the Ericsson product it is GPS enabled, supports data rates of 7.2Mbps downstream and is a PC Express format about the same size as the Ericsson unit. Neither company has given any indication of what impact inclusion of its module will have on the price of a laptop. However Ericsson forecasts a very large market for these products.

It notes that there are currently more than 160 commercially deployed HSPA networks globally serving more than one billion cellphone users. Market projections indicate that in 2011, approximately 200 million notebooks will ship annually and Ericsson anticipates that 50 percent of those will feature a built-in HSPA mobile broadband module. It expects that by 2010, 71 percent of mobile broadband connections will be HSPA-based.