GSM Alliance Wants To Push Mobile Broadband Further, Leaves Intel, Nokia and Wimax Outside

16 IT and telecoms giants have banded together to create an industry wide platform - uninspiringly called "Mobile broadband" - to support the worldwide roll out of Wireless 3G broadband across a range of products including laptops and even white appliances liek fridges or cameras.

The group counts some of the biggest names in the industry with the likes of Dell, Toshiba, Qualcomm, T-Mobile, Three, Microsoft, Asus, Lenovo, Telefonica, Orange and Vodafone and has pledged a whopping USD 1 billion budget to promote mobile broadband in 2009.

Interestingly, neither Intel - the biggest chip manufacturer and firm backer of WiMAX, nor Nokia, the world's biggest phone manufacturer, are amongst the founding members of Mobile Broadband.

The first devices, a range of laptops which will bear the Mobile Broadband logo, are expected to appear within the next three months, before Christmas and will try to make 3G connectivity as unobtrusive and as seamless as possible, with the ultimate goal of having an instantaneous connectivity, just as it is the case with mobile phones.

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Latest research show that more than 55 million people are regular mobile broadband users with an expected one billion mobile broadband customers expected by 2012, partly fuelled by the meteoric rise of cheap laptops and netbooks as well as the falling price of wireless broadband modules.

Mobile broadband users can expect speeds starting from 1mbps going all the way up to 7mbps for those using LTE or HSDPA technology.